Madness: A Bipolar Life
by Marya Hornbacher
Harper
HK$128
Even cheerful readers will lurch towards depression if they read this. By Marya Hornbacher, whose book Wasted chronicled her fight with eating disorders, Madness forks into a bipolar journey that is an exhausting read because of all the careening and crashing. Alcohol and sex dull and enhance Hornbacher's moods, which include skyscraping highs and lows that threaten to bury her. Childhood methods to induce calm - baths would dissipate her energy - are replaced later in life with hospitalisation, electroshock therapy and daily medication. Cynics may wonder about the popularity of such feel-bad work. Perhaps some readers find it life-affirming to read about survivors. It could be that they enjoy being afforded the voyeur's peephole. Maybe it doesn't matter and it's all about the author. Hornbacher, however, is adamant that writing about her mood mayhem is rarely cathartic. Why then does she flog her disorders? 'I wanted people to ... feel that they were reading not so much my story as their own,' she writes. She would be more believable if she acknowledged that misery memoirs sell.