Madness: A Bipolar Life

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 299 pages
• Published by: Houghton Mifflin April 9, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0618754458
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0618754458
• Book Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 15.2 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Hornbacher, who detailed her struggle with bulimia and anorexia in Wasted, now shares the story of her lifelong battle with mental illness, finally diagnosed as rapid cycling type 1 bipolar disorder. Even as a toddler, Hornbacher couldn't sleep at night and jabbered endlessly, trying to talk her parents into going outside to play in the dark. Other schoolchildren called her crazy. When she was just 10, she discovered alcohol was a good mood stabilizer; by age 14, she was trading sex for pills. In her late teens, her eating disorder landed her in the hospital, followed by another body obsession, cutting. An alcoholic by this point, she was alternating between mania and depression, with frequent hospitalizations. Her doctor explained that not only did the alcohol block her medications, it was up to her to control her mental illness, which would always be with her. This truth didn't sink in for a long, long time, but when it did, she had a chance for a life outside her local hospital's psychiatric unit. Hornbacher ends on a cautiously optimistic note—she knows she'll never lead a normal life, but maybe she could live with the life she does have. Although painfully self-absorbed, Hornbacher will touch a nerve with readers struggling to cope with mental illness. (Apr.)
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Product Description
An amazing dispatch from inside the belly of bipolar disorder, reflecting major new insights

When Marya Hornbacher published her first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet have the piece of shattering knowledge that would finally make sense of the chaos of her life. At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type I rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disorder.

In Madness, in her trademark wry and utterly self-revealing voice, Hornbacher tells her new story. Through scenes of amazing visceral and emotional power, she takes us inside her own desperate attempts to counteract violently careening mood swings by self-starvation, substance abuse, numbing sex, and self-mutilation. How Hornbacher fights her way up from a madness that all but destroys her, and what it is like to live in a difficult and sometimes gorgeous life and marriage -- where bipolar always beckons -- is at the center of this brave and heart-stopping memoir.

Madness delivers the revelation that Hornbacher is not alone: millions of people in America today are struggling with a variety of disorders that may disguise their bipolar disease. And Hornbacher's fiercely self-aware portrait of her own bipolar as early as age four will powerfully change, too, the current debate on whether bipolar in children actually exists.

Ten years after Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, this storm of a memoir will revolutionize our understanding of bipolar disorder.

Reader Reviews
'Madness' lives up to Ms. Hornbacher's first memoir, 'Wasted', and in the same take-no-prisoner style that is hers almost exclusively, gives readers a first-hand glimpse inside the head and heart of a typical victim of the insanity that is (untreated) bipolar. She is honest and unapologetic, she is in-your-face, and she is raw. I sympathized with Marya so much in this memoir that I couldn't help but feel elated when she found moments of peace, and desperate during each of her countless hospitalizations...even if some of them were hastened by her own hand. She shows readers that a person can be both severely mentally ill and outrageously successful at the same time. She dispels many myths about mental illness in this book, as she did with eating disorders in 'Wasted.' Marya Horbacher is brilliant, and the unimaginable setbacks she has suffered in her young life have done nothing to change that; in fact, they have made her stronger and infinitely more compassionate. With a quick wit and self-deprecating humor, Ms. Hornbacher has penned another brilliantly intense memoir that, in my opinion, is on-par with any of Elizabeth Wurtzel's writings, and perhaps even better. Comment | | (Report this)