O This Poor Brain! Ten Thousand Shapes of Fury are Whirling There and Reason is No More

books:


	• Madness: A Bipolar Life Marya Hornbacher Houghton Mifflin, 2008 - 299 pages average customer review:based on 34 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Amidst all, a love story

Not to detract from the seriousness of the author's journey, Madness: A Bipolar Life also contains a very sweet love story. It is not easy to love someone with mental health complications, and during the book I kept expecting to read of an unbalanced relationship, where he was the protector, and she was the victim. Instead, Ms. Hornbacher distills a mix of humor, uncertainity and unyielding affection to show a real relationship with her husband, Jeff. In doing that, she gives hope to us all.

couldn't put it down

I found this book to be extremely captivting. I could not put it down. I have a family member who is bipolar, and I really think this was a wonderful account of the disease. I would recommend this to anyone who wants an inside look at this disease.

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O This Poor Brain! Ten Thousand Shapes of Fury are Whirling There and Reason is No More - Henry Fielding

It seems that every bipolar believes that they need to write a book about themselves. Look at me. I am writing a blog. I have read a bunch of them. That says more about me than about the books. Some are pretty good. Some are not so hot. But I like this one.

Marya is bipolar I. I'm sure every bipolar I would say, "What's so weird about her life." The rest of us would say, "I'm glad I'm not her." She takes us everywhere; professional life, love lives (of course she drove lovers away), family life, suicides, nuthouses, medications, all that.

She is actually a writer. She paints a visual and emotional picture of the real thing. I was invited to become part of her life and I accepted the invitation. I was in the doctor's office crawling on the file cabinets with her. I was riding in the car with her on a bipolar trip to California. She could have left that out of the book. I have already done that one.

It doesn't seem that she makes any part of her life out of bounds. It is a real book about a real person. I don't guess that anyone who is bipolar needs to know what it is like to be bipolar, but maybe family, friends, or someone else does. Or if you have allowed yourself to fall back into self-pity this might be good company. I thought the book was a good one.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

An astonishing 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 astonishing 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 beautiful 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.

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