Poignantly, Forney feels guilty that she doesn't want to hang on to her sufferings, and wonders if this makes her a lesser artist. On Van Gogh's art, she wonders: "Was he trying to pin down the confusing swirls inside his head to bring them outside?" She studies that other great paint swirler, Munch, and discovers that he wanted to keep suffering, as he felt rudderless without his depressions.
So as well as detailed descriptions of meds – too addictive Klonopin, memory-stifling Lithium, weight-gain inducing Zyprexa, orgasm-stopping Tegretal – there are also digressions into the lives of famously depressive artists and writers she admires. "I'd forgotten how I used to see things in other things – and I realised my depression was finally lifting." At one point she hugs a tree, crying with her face pressed into the bark until she has run out of tears.Ī question that runs through her mind – and the book – is that old one about whether being bipolar will help her art. After a swimming session she stares at droplets on the wall in the shower and sees in them a night-time festival in the woods, with strings of lights in the trees. A short while later, she starts to get better. These moments are nicely juxtaposed with comic scenes, such as a yoga class where she gets freaked out by the name "corpse pose". Some are of hallucinations – faces she sees in her own fingers, for instance – and another is an image of her 1999 self rising from the ashes of the slumped-on-the-floor 1998 Ellen. The most powerful images are the drawings she did in her deepest depressions. Parts are genuinely gripping, as she explores remedies from lithium to yoga. A few pages later we see her slipping down again, sliding literally over the edge of a cliff. For instance, there is a double page where she is planning her book launch, full of busy lines and arrows to indicate a full force brainstorm. Most of the book documents a familiar path, the one signposted the Road to Recovery (or at least stability), though fortunately it never feels too familiar thanks to Forney's representations of her different mental states.
One speech bubble declares "I don't want balance, I want brilliance! Meds would hold me down!" Meanwhile, on the same page, the sword of Damocles hangs above her head.
What will be particularly familiar for those who have been through similar experiences is the sense of denial. Here the main person Forney betrays is herself, and she does so with wit, irony and pathos. To write a memoir, we are told, involves the ability to betray people.
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