Sewing more black lines and finishing the audio version of Marya Horbacher's Madness: A Bipolar Life (2008). I'll cop to the fact that I'm usually drawn in by voyeuristic and dark glimpses into people's lives, but this book was so unsettling I was tempted to put it aside and retreat into one of those cozy books where someone's cat solves a crime.
Doesn't the word "madness" sound affected? It's a word best left to college girls into romanticizing the lives of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. It's not easy to sit through episode after episode of someone's endless mood swings, which are greatly exacerbated by a refusal to take meds properly and not combine them with alcohol. But being ill is not her fault -- even when she does everything right, she still finds herself a prisoner of her own delusions, and this is true horror.
I appreciated her first book Wasted (1999), also a memoir (two memoirs and you're how old?). She's a sympathetic writer whose work has no doubt created community among those who share her illness, but it's sad to see another writer going down the Dave Pelzer (“A Child Called It, et al.) path, doomed to repeat the success of one misery memoir with another gloomier one.
More:
http://blogs.citypages.com/gimmenoise/2008/04/marya_horbacher.php
http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/17274934.html
