autobiography books on depression

50 Must-Read Memoirs of Mental Illness

Sarah S. Davis

Sarah S. Davis holds a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master's of Library Science from Clarion University, and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Sarah has also written for Electric Literature, Kirkus Reviews, Audible, Psych Central, and more. Sarah is the founder of Broke By Books blog and runs a tarot reading business, Divination Vibration . Twitter: @missbookgoddess Instagram: @Sarahbookgoddess

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Descriptions graciously supplied from publisher descriptions and condensed when necessary.

Agorafabulous! by Sara Benincasa

“Comedian, writer, blogger, radio and podcast host, and YouTube sensation, Sara Benincasa bravely and outrageously brings us ‘Dispatches from My Bedroom’ with  Agorafabulous!  One of the funniest and most poignant books ever written about a mental illness,  Agorafabulous!  is a hilarious, raw, and unforgettable account of how a terrified young woman, literally trapped by her own imagination, evolved into a (relatively) high-functioning professional smartass.” (Amazon)

The Body Papers by Grace Talusan

“Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s memoir  The Body Papers  bravely explores her experiences with sexual abuse, depression, cancer, and life as a Filipino immigrant, supplemented with government documents, medical records, and family photos.” (Amazon)

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

“… Brain on Fire  is the powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity.

When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?

In a swift and breathtaking narrative, Susannah tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn’t happen.” (Amazon)

The Buddha and the Borderline by Kiera Van Gelder

“Kiera Van Gelder’s first suicide attempt at the age of twelve marked the onset of her struggles with drug addiction, depression, post-traumatic stress, self-harm, and chaotic romantic relationships-all of which eventually led to doctors’ belated diagnosis of borderline personality disorder twenty years later.

The Buddha and the Borderline  is a window into this mysterious and debilitating condition, an unblinking portrayal of one woman’s fight against the emotional devastation of borderline personality disorder. This haunting, intimate memoir chronicles both the devastating period that led to Kiera’s eventual diagnosis and her inspirational recovery through therapy, Buddhist spirituality, and a few online dates gone wrong. Kiera’s story sheds light on the private struggle to transform suffering into compassion for herself and others, and is essential reading for all seeking to understand what it truly means to recover and reclaim the desire to live.” (Amazon)

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness  by Elyn R. Saks

“Elyn R. Saks is an esteemed professor, lawyer, and psychiatrist and is the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Law School, yet she has suffered from schizophrenia for most of her life, and still has ongoing major episodes of the illness.

The Center Cannot Hold  is the eloquent, moving story of Elyn’s life, from the first time that she heard voices speaking to her as a young teenager, to attempted suicides in college, through learning to live on her own as an adult in an often terrifying world. Saks discusses frankly the paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, the voices in her head telling her to kill herself (and to harm others), as well as the incredibly difficult obstacles she overcame to become a highly respected professional. This beautifully written memoir is destined to become a classic in its genre.” (Amazon)

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

“An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness,  The Collected Schizophrenias  cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community’s own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang’s analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. An essay collection of undeniable power,  The Collected Schizophrenias  dispels misconceptions and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood.” (Amazon)

The Color of Hope: People of Color Mental Health Narratives  edited by Vanessa Hazzard

“ The Color of Hope: People of Color Mental Health Narratives is a project that sheds light on mental health in communities of color by sharing stories by those affected by mental illness. By sharing our stories, we open up discussion around the topic and break through stigma and shame. The contributors represent those living with or affected by loved ones with depression, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and other conditions. They are men and women, children and adults, political prisoners, college students, politicians, musicians, business people, artists, fathers, mothers, daughters…all of African, Latino, and Asian descent. Their narratives add to the tapestry of the human experience and without them, our history is incomplete.” (Amazon)

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron

“A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron’s true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression’s psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.”

(Don’t) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation about Mental Health edited by (Book Riot Editor) Kelly Jensen

“To understand mental health, we need to talk openly about it. Because there’s no single definition of crazy, there’s no single experience that embodies it, and the word itself means different things—wild? extreme? disturbed? passionate?—to different people.

In  (Don’t) Call Me Crazy , thirty-three actors, athletes, writers, and artists offer essays, lists, comics, and illustrations that explore a wide range of topics: their personal experiences with mental illness, how we do and don’t talk about mental health, help for better understanding how every person’s brain is wired differently, and what, exactly, might make someone crazy.” (Amazon)

Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression by Brooke Shields

“In her bestselling memoir, Brooke Shields shares with the world her deeply personal experience with postpartum depression

When Brooke Shields welcomed her newborn daughter to the world, her joyful expectations were quickly followed by something unexpected–a crippling depression. In what is sure to strike a chord with the millions of women who suffer from depression after childbirth, Brooke Shields shares how she, too, battled a condition that is widely misunderstood, despite the fact that it affects many new mothers. She discusses the illness in the context of her life, including her struggle to get pregnant, the high expectations she had for herself and that others placed on her as a new mom, and the role of her husband, friends, and family as she struggled to attain her maternal footing in the midst of a disabling depression.” (Amazon)

Fast Girl: A Life Spent Running from Madness by Suzy Favor Hamilton

“The former middle distance Olympic runner and high-end escort speaks out for the first time about her battle with mental illness, and how mania controlled and compelled her in competition, but also in life. ” (Amazon)

This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son by Charlotte Pierce-Baker

“Charlotte Pierce-Baker did everything right when raising her son, providing not only emotional support but the best education possible. At age twenty-five, he was pursuing a postgraduate degree and seemingly in control of his life. She never imagined her high-achieving son would wind up handcuffed, dirty, and in jail.

The moving story of an African American family facing the challenge of bipolar disorder,  This Fragile Life  provides insight into mental disorders as well as family dynamics. Pierce-Bakertraces the evolution of her son’s illness and, in looking back, realizes she mistook warning signs for typical child and teen behavior. Hospitalizations, calls in the night, alcohol and drug relapses, pleas for money, and continuous disputes, her son’s journey was long, arduous, and almost fatal.  This Fragile Life  weaves a fascinating story of mental illness, race, family, the drive of African Americans to succeed, and a mother’s love for her son.” (Amazon)

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

“In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years in the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.

Kaysen’s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a “parallel universe” set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties.  Girl, Interrupted  is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.” (Amazon)

Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life by Melody Moezzi

“With candor and humor, a manic-depressive Iranian-American Muslim woman chronicles her experiences with both clinical and cultural bipolarity.

Born to Persian parents at the height of the Islamic Revolution and raised amid a vibrant, loving, and gossipy Iranian diaspora in the American heartland, Melody Moezzi was bound for a bipolar life. At 18, she began battling a severe physical illness, and her community stepped up, filling her hospital rooms with roses, lilies and hyacinths.

But when she attempted suicide and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, there were no flowers. Despite several stays in psychiatric hospitals, bombarded with tranquilizers, mood-stabilizers, and anti-psychotics, she was encouraged to keep her illness a secret—by both her family and an increasingly callous and indifferent medical establishment. Refusing to be ashamed or silenced, Moezzi became an outspoken advocate, determined to fight the stigma surrounding mental illness and reclaim her life along the way.

Both an irreverent memoir and a rousing call to action,  Haldol and Hyacinths  is the moving story of a woman who refused to become a victim. Moezzi reports from the frontlines of an invisible world, as seen through a unique and fascinating cultural lens. A powerful, funny, and moving narrative,  Haldol and Hyacinths  is a tribute to the healing power of hope and humor.” (Amazon)

Heart Berries: A Memoir  by Terese Marie Mailhot

“ Heart Berries  is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is  Heart Berries , a memorial for Mailhot’s mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.

Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn’t exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.” (Amazon)

Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon

“In  Heavy , Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling.  Heavy  is a ‘gorgeous, gutting…generous’ ( The New York Times ) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.” (Amazon)

How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell

“From the  New York Times  bestselling author and former beauty editor Cat Marnell, a “vivid, maddening, heartbreaking, very funny, chaotic” ( The   New York Times ) memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs.

At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at  Lucky , one of the top fashion magazines in America—and that’s all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret life. She was a prescription drug addict. She was also a “doctor shopper” who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills; a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods; a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets; a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything— anything —to sleep.

This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep school—and with a prescription for the Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnell’s amphetamine-fueled rise from intern to editor through the beauty departments of  NYLON ,  Teen Vogue ,  Glamour , and  Lucky . We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. From the Condé Nast building to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell “treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty.…with the skill of a pulp novelist” ( The New York Times Book Review ) what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say  no .” (Amazon)

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

“New York Times  bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In  Hunger,  she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen.  Hunger  is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn’t yet been told but needs to be.” (Amazon)

Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland

“When thirty-year-old, award-winning human rights journalist Mac McClelland left Haiti after reporting on the devastating earthquake of 2010, she never imagined how the assignment would irrevocably affect her own life. Back home in California, McClelland cannot stop reliving vivid scenes of violence. She is plagued by waking terrors, violent fantasies, and crippling emotional breakdowns. She can’t sleep or stop crying. Her life in shambles, it becomes clear that she is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her bewilderment about this sudden loss of control is magnified by the intensity of her feelings for Nico, a French soldier she met in Port-au-Prince and with whom she connected instantly and deeply.

With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. She begins to probe the depths of her illness, exploring our culture’s history with PTSD, delving into the latest research by the country’s top scientists and therapists, and spending time with veterans and their families. McClelland discovers she is far from alone: while we frequently associate PTSD with wartime combat, it is more often caused by other manner of trauma and can even be contagious-close proximity to those afflicted can trigger its symptoms. As she confronts the realities of her diagnosis, she opens up to the love that seems to have found her at an inopportune moment.” (Amazon)

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by Mark Vonnegut, M.D.

“More than thirty years after the publication of his acclaimed memoir  The Eden Express,  Mark Vonnegut continues his story in this searingly funny, iconoclastic account of coping with mental illness, finding his calling, and learning that willpower isn’t nearly enough.

Here is Mark’s life childhood as the son of a struggling writer, as well as the world after Mark was released from a mental hospital. At the late age of twenty-eight and after nineteen rejections, he is finally accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he gains purpose, a life, and some control over his condition. There are the manic episodes, during which he felt burdened with saving the world, juxtaposed against the real-world responsibilities of running a pediatric practice.

Ultimately a tribute to the small, daily, and positive parts of a life interrupted by bipolar disorder,  Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So  is a wise, unsentimental, and inspiring book that will resonate with generations of readers.” (Amazon)

Just Checking: Scenes from the Life of an Obsessive Compulsive by Emily Colas

“This raw, darkly comic series of astonishing vignettes is Emily Colas’ achingly honest chronicle of her twisted journey through the obsessive-compulsive disorder that came to dominate her world. In the beginning it was germs and food. By the time she faced the fact that she was really ‘losing it,’ Colas had become a slave to her own ‘hobbies’ — from the daily hair cutting to incessant inspections of her children’s clothing for bloodstains.

A shocking, hilarious, enormously appealing account of a young woman struggling to gain control of her life, this is Emily Colas’ exposé of a soul tormented, but balanced by a buoyance of spirit and a piercing sense of humor that may be her saving grace.” (Amazon)

A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise by Sandra Allen

“Writer Sandra Allen did not know their uncle Bob very well. As a child, Sandy had been told Bob was ‘crazy,’ that he had spent time in mental hospitals while growing up in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s. But Bob had lived a hermetic life in a remote part of California for longer than Sandy had been alive, and what little Sandy knew of him came from rare family reunions or odd, infrequent phone calls. Then in 2009 Bob mailed Sandy his autobiography. Typewritten in all caps, a stream of error-riddled sentences over sixty, single-spaced pages, the often-incomprehensible manuscript proclaimed to be a ‘true story’ about being ‘labeled a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic,’ and arrived with a plea to help him get his story out to the world.

In  A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia , Sandy translates Bob’s autobiography, artfully creating a gripping coming-of-age story while sticking faithfully to the facts as he shared them. Lacing Bob’s narrative with chapters providing greater contextualization, Sandy also shares background information about their family, the culturally explosive time and place of their uncle’s formative years, and the vitally important questions surrounding schizophrenia and mental healthcare in America more broadly. The result is a heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious portrait of a young man striving for stability in his life as well as his mind, and an utterly unique lens into an experience that, to most people, remains unimaginable.” (Amazon)

Lights On, Rats Out by Cree LeFavour

“As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm: with each newly lit cigarette, the world would drop away as her focus narrowed on the blooming release of pleasure-pain as the burning tip was applied to an unblemished patch of skin. Her body was a canvas of cruelty; each scar a mark of pride and shame.

In sharp and shocking language,  Lights On, Rats Out  brings us closely into these years. We see the world as Cree did―turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. The heady thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Adam N. Kohl―whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing―comes to be the only bright spot in her days.

Lights On, Rats Out  describes a fiercely smart and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.” (Amazon)

Lit by Mary Karr

“ Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner, Mary Karr’s descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness–and to her astonishing resurrection. Karr’s longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can’t outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in ‘The Mental Marriott,’ with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, ‘Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!’ has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity. Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober, becoming a mother by letting go of a mother, learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr’s relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up–as only Mary Karr can tell it.” (Amazon)

Losing Dad, Paranoid Schizophrenia: A Family’s Search for Hope  by Amanda LaPera

“Silver Award recipient of IBPA’s prestigious Benjamin Franklin book award in the category of psychology, Losing Dad, Paranoid Schizophrenia: A Family’s Search for Hope is the compelling true story of a family’s struggle with the sudden onset of their father’s severe mental illness. The wife, children, and extended family of ‘Joseph,’ lacking an understanding of his condition, are left to deal with his upsetting transformation. The perspectives of his three children, his spouse, and his own distorted reality combine to offer readers a glimpse of a world that will either feel hauntingly familiar or mind-boggling.

Losing Dad poignantly shows the effects of inadequate treatment for those living with a severe mental illness in America.” (Amazon)

Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl by Stacy Pershall

“Stacy Pershall grew up as an overly intelligent, depressed, deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, population 1,000. From her days as a thirteen-year-old Jesus freak through her eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, this spirited memoir chronicles Pershall’s journey through hell and her struggle with the mental health care system.” (Amazon)

The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought  by David Adam

“David Adam―an editor at  Nature  and an accomplished science writer―has suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for twenty years, and  The Man Who Couldn’t Stop  is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. In this riveting and intimate blend of science, history, and memoir, Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind and explains how they drive millions of us toward obsession and compulsion. Told with fierce clarity, humor, and urgent lyricism,  The Man Who Couldn’t Stop  is a haunting story of a personal nightmare that shines a light into the darkest corners of our minds.” (Amazon)

Manic: A Memoir by Terri Cheney

“On the outside, Terri Cheney was a highly successful, attractive Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer. But behind her seemingly flawless façade lay a dangerous secret—for the better part of her life Cheney had been battling debilitating bipolar disorder and concealing a pharmacy’s worth of prescriptions meant to stabilize her moods and make her ‘normal.’

In bursts of prose that mirror the devastating highs and extreme lows of her illness, Cheney describes her roller-coaster life with shocking honesty—from glamorous parties to a night in jail; from flying fourteen kites off the edge of a cliff in a thunderstorm to crying beneath her office desk; from electroshock therapy to a suicide attempt fueled by tequila and prescription painkillers.

With  Manic , Cheney gives voice to the unarticulated madness she endured. The clinical terms used to describe her illness were so inadequate that she chose to focus instead on her own experience, in her words, ‘on what bipolar disorder felt like inside my own body.’ Here the events unfold episodically, from mood to mood, the way she lived and remembers life. In this way the reader is able to viscerally experience the incredible speeding highs of mania and the crushing blows of depression, just as Cheney did. Manic does not simply explain bipolar disorder—it takes us in its grasp and does not let go.” (Amazon)

Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir by Ellen Forney

“Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passions and creativity.

Searching to make sense of the popular concept of the crazy artist, she finds inspiration from the lives and work of other artists and writers who suffered from mood disorders, including Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, William Styron, and Sylvia Plath. She also researches the clinical aspects of bipolar disorder, including the strengths and limitations of various treatments and medications, and what studies tell us about the conundrum of attempting to “cure” an otherwise brilliant mind.

Darkly funny and intensely personal, Forney’s memoir provides a visceral glimpse into the effects of a mood disorder on an artist’s work, as she shares her own story through bold black-and-white images and evocative prose.” (Amazon)

Mean by Myriam Gurba

“True crime, memoir, and ghost story,  Mean  is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba’s coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. Blending radical formal fluidity and caustic humor, Gurba takes on sexual violence, small towns, and race, turning what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy. This is a confident, intoxicating, brassy book that takes the cost of sexual assault, racism, misogyny, and homophobia deadly seriously.” (Amazon)

Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind by Jamie Lowe

“It began in Los Angeles in 1993, when Jaime Lowe was just sixteen. She stopped sleeping and eating, and began to hallucinate—demonically cackling Muppets, faces lurking in windows, Michael Jackson delivering messages from the Neverland Underground. Lowe wrote manifestos and math equations in her diary, and drew infographics on her bedroom wall. Eventu­ally, hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar, she was prescribed a medication that came in the form of three pink pills—lithium.

In  Mental , Lowe shares and investigates her story of episodic madness, as well as the stabil­ity she found while on lithium. She interviews scientists, psychiatrists, and patients to examine how effective lithium really is and how its side effects can be dangerous for long-term users—including Lowe, who after twenty years on the medication suffers from severe kidney damage.  Mental  is eye-opening and powerful, tackling an illness and drug that has touched millions of lives and yet remains shrouded in social stigma.” (Amazon)

My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind  by Scott Stossel

“Drawing on his own longstanding battle with anxiety, Scott Stossel presents a moving and revelatory account of a condition that affects some 40 million Americans. Stossel offers an intimate and authoritative history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand anxiety. We discover the well-known who have struggled with the condition, as well as the afflicted generations of Stossel’s own family. Revealing anxiety’s myriad manifestations and the anguish it causes, he also surveys the countless psychotherapies, medications, and often outlandish treatments that have been developed to relieve it.

Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze. He also explores how individual sufferers—including himself—have managed and controlled symptoms. By turns erudite and compassionate, amusing and inspirational,  My Age of Anxiety  is the essential account of a pervasive and too often misunderstood affliction.” (Amazon)

My Body is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta

“As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren’t threatening her life, they’re shoving her from depression to mania and back in the space of an hour. Her crisis of American Indian identity bleeds into other areas of self-doubt; mental illness, sexual trauma, ethnic identity, and independence become intertwined. Sifting through the scraps of her past in seventeen formally inventive chapters, Washuta aligns the strictures of her Catholic school education with C osmopolitan ’s mandates for womanhood, views memories through the distorting lens of  Law & Order: Special Victims Unit , and contrasts her bipolar highs and lows with those of Britney Spears and Kurt Cobain. Built on the bones of fundamental identity questions as contorted by a distressed brain,  My Body Is a Book of Rules  pulls no punches in its self-deprecating and ferocious look at human fallibility.” (Amazon)

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Nagata Kabi

“ My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness  is an honest and heartfelt look at one young woman’s exploration of her sexuality, mental well-being, and growing up in our modern age. Told using expressive artwork that invokes both laughter and tears, this moving and highly entertaining single volume depicts not only the artist’s burgeoning sexuality, but many other personal aspects of her life that will resonate with readers.” (Amazon)

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon

“ The Noonday Demon  examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers, and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease as well as the reasons for hope. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications and treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations—around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by biological explanations for mental illness. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning.” (Amazon)

Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: A Memoir of Bulimia  by Stephanie Covington Armstrong

“Stephanie Covington Armstrong does not fit the stereotype of a woman with an eating disorder. She grew up poor and hungry in the inner city. Foster care, sexual abuse, and overwhelming insecurity defined her early years. But the biggest difference is her race: Stephanie is black.

In this moving first-person narrative, Armstrong describes her struggle as a black woman with a disorder consistently portrayed as a white woman’s problem. Trying to escape her self-hatred and her food obsession by never slowing down, Stephanie becomes trapped in a downward spiral. Finally, she can no longer deny that she will die if she doesn’t get help, overcome her shame, and conquer her addiction to using food as a weapon against herself.” (Amazon)

Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America by Elizabeth Wurtzel

“Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger on the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. Her famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs,  Prozac Nation  is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of  Girl, Interrupted  and Sylvia Plath’s  The Bell Jar. ” (Amazon)

The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett

“At seventeen Lori Schiller was the perfect child-the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia. She began an ordeal of hospitalizations, halfway houses, relapses, more suicide attempts, and constant, withering despair. But against all odds, she survived.

In this personal account, she tells how she did it, taking us not only into her own shattered world, but drawing on the words of the doctors who treated her and family members who suffered with her.” (Amazon)

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

“ Running with Scissors  is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor’s bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull an electroshock- therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing and bestselling account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.” (Amazon)

Shadows in the Sun: Healing from Depression and Finding the Light Within by Gayathri Ramprasad

“A first-of-its-kind, cross-cultural lens to mental illness through the inspiring story of Gayathri’s thirty-year battle with depression. This literary memoir takes readers from her childhood in India where depression is thought to be a curse to life in America where she eventually finds the light within by drawing on both her rich Hindu heritage and Western medicine to find healing.” (Amazon)

Shook One: Anxiety Playing Tricks on Me by Charlemagne Tha God

“Being ‘shook’ is more than a rap lyric for Charlamagne, it’s his mission to overcome. While it may seem like he’s ahead of the game, he is actually plagued by anxieties, such as the fear of losing his roots, the fear of being a bad dad, and the fear of being a terrible husband. Shook One chronicles his journey to beat those fears and shows a path that you too can take to overcome the anxieties that may be holding you back.

Ironically, Charlamagne’s fear of failure—of falling into the life of stagnation or crime that caught up so many of his friends and family in his hometown of Moncks Corner—has been the fuel that has propelled him to success. However, even after achieving national prominence as a radio personality, Charlamagne still found himself paralyzed by anxiety and distrust. Now, in Shook One , he is working through these problems—many of which he traces back to cultural PTSD—with help from mentors, friends, and therapy. Being anxious doesn’t serve the same purpose anymore. Through therapy, he’s figuring out how to get over the irrational fears that won’t take him anywhere positive.

Charlamange hopes Shook On e can be a call to action: Getting help is your right. Therapy and showing weakness are not always easy subjects, but if you go to the gym three or four times a week, why can’t you put that same effort and energy into getting mentally strong?” (Amazon)

Sick: A Memoir  by Porochista Khakpour

“For as long as author Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. For most of that time, she didn’t know why. Several drug addictions, some major hospitalizations, and over $100,000 later, she finally had a diagnosis: late-stage Lyme disease.

Sick  is Khakpour’s grueling, emotional journey—as a woman, an Iranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems—in which she examines her subsequent struggles with mental illness and her addiction to doctor prescribed benzodiazepines, that both aided and eroded her ever-deteriorating physical health. Divided by settings, Khakpour guides the reader through her illness by way of the locations that changed her course—New York, LA, Santa Fe, and a college town in Germany—as she meditates on the physiological and psychological impacts of uncertainty, and the eventual challenge of accepting the diagnosis she had searched for over the course of her adult life.

A story of survival, pain, and transformation,  Sick  candidly examines the colossal impact of illness on one woman’s life by not just highlighting the failures of a broken medical system but by also boldly challenging our concept of illness narratives.” (Amazon)

Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide by Darryl McDaniels

“As one third of the legendary rap group Run D.M.C., Darryl ‘DMC’ McDaniels—aka Legendary MC, The Devastating Mic Controller, and the King of Rock—had it all: talent, money, fame, prestige. While hitting #1 on the  Billboard  charts was exhilarating, the group’s success soon became overwhelming. A creative guy who enjoyed being at home alone or with his family, DMC turned to alcohol to numb himself, a retreat that became an addiction. For years, he went through the motions. But in 1997, when intoxication could no longer keep the pain at bay, he plunged into severe depression and became suicidal. He wasn’t alone. During the same period, suicide became the number three leading cause of death among black people—a health crisis that continues to this day.

In this riveting memoir, DMC speaks openly about his emotional and psychological struggles and the impact on his life, and addresses the many reasons that led him—and thousands of others—to consider suicide. Some of the factors include not being true to who you are, feelings of loneliness, isolation, and alienation, and a lack of understanding and support from friends and family when it’s needed most. He also provides essential information on resources for getting help. Revealing how even the most successful people can suffer from depression, DMC offers inspiration for everyone in pain—information and insight that he hopes can help save other lives.” (Amazon)

This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression by Daphne Merkin

“‘Despair is always described as dull,’ writes Daphne Merkin, ‘when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.’  This Close to Happy ―Merkin’s rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression―captures this strange light.

Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls ‘the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome.’ The arc of Merkin’s affliction is lifelong, beginning in a childhood largely bereft of love and stretching into the present, where Merkin lives a high-functioning life and her depression is manageable, if not ‘cured.’ ‘The opposite of depression,’ she writes with characteristic insight, ‘is not a state of unimaginable happiness . . . but a state of relative all-right-ness.’

In this dark yet vital memoir, Merkin describes not only the harrowing sorrow that she has known all her life, but also her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her,  This  Close to Happy  is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that many share but few talk about, one that remains shrouded in stigma. In the words of the distinguished psychologist Carol Gilligan, ‘It brings a stunningly perceptive voice into the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.'” (Amazon)

Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain by Portia de Rossi

“Author Portia de Rossi weighed only 82 pounds when she collapsed on the set of the Hollywood film in which she was playing her first leading role. This should have the culmination of all her years of hard work – first as a child model in Australia, then as a cast member of one of the hottest shows on American television. On the outside she was thin and blond, glamorous and successful. On the inside, she was literally dying. In this searing, unflinchingly honest book, Portia de Rossi captures the complex emotional truth of what it is like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. In this remarkable and beautifully written work, Portia shines a bright light on a dark subject. A crucial book for all those who might sometimes feel at war with themselves or their bodies. Unbearable Lightness is a story that inspires hope and nourishes the spirit.” (Amazon)

Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression  edited by Nell Casey

“ Unholy Ghost  is a unique collection of essays about depression that, in the spirit of William Styron’s Darkness Visible, finds vivid expression for an elusive illness suffered by more than one in five Americans today. Unlike any other memoir of depression, however,  Unholy Ghost  includes many voices and depicts the most complete portrait of the illness. Lauren Slater eloquently describes her own perilous experience as a pregnant woman on antidepressant medication. Susanna Kaysen, writing for the first time about depression since  Girl, Interrupted,  criticizes herself and others for making too much of the illness. Larry McMurtry recounts the despair that descended after his quadruple bypass surgery. Meri Danquah describes the challenges of racism and depression. Ann Beattie sees melancholy as a consequence of her writing life. And Donald Hall lovingly remembers the “moody seesaw” of his relationship with his wife, Jane Kenyon.” (Amazon)

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness  by Kay Redfield Jamison

“In her bestselling classic,  An Unquiet Mind,  Kay Redfield Jamison changed the way we think about moods and madness.

Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, Jamison found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide.

Here Jamison examines bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication.  An Unquiet Mind  is a memoir of enormous candor, vividness, and wisdom—a deeply powerful book that has both transformed and saved lives.” (Amazon)

Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher

“Precociously intelligent, imaginative, energetic and ambitious, Marya Hornbacher grew up in a comfortable middle-class American home. At the age of five, she returned from a ballet class one day, put on an enormous sweater, curled up on her bed and cried — because she thought she was fat. By age nine, she was secretly bulimic, throwing up at home after school while watching  The Brady Bunch  reruns on television and munching Fritos. She added anorexia to her repertoire a few years later and took great pride in her ability to starve.

Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and step into a netherworld where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex and death? Marya Hornbacher sustained both anorexia and bulimia through five lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, the loss of family, friends, jobs and, ultimately, any sense of what it meant to be “normal.” In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, she re-creates the experience and illuminates the tangle of personal, family and cultural causes that underlie eating disorders.”

What Becomes of the Brokenhearted by E. Lynn Harris

“In many ways writing saved my life. It’s my hope that sharing my experience will give hope to others who are learning to deal with their “difference.” I want them to know they don’t have to live their lives in a permanent “don’t ask, don’t tell” existence. Truth is a powerful tool. “But my hope for this book doesn’t stop there. I think there is a message here for anyone who has ever suffered from a lack of self-esteem, felt the pain of loneliness, or sought love in all the wrong places. The lessons I have learned are not limited to race, gender, or sexual orientation. Anyone can learn from my journey. Anyone can overcome a broken heart.”–E. Lynn Harris (Amazon)

Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah

“This moving memoir of an African-American woman’s lifelong fight to identify and overcome depression offers an inspirational story of healing and emergence. Wrapped within Danquah’s engaging account of this universal affliction is rare and insightful testimony about what it means to be black, female, and battling depression in a society that often idealizes black women as strong, nurturing caregivers. A startlingly honest, elegantly rendered depiction of depression, Willow Weep for Me calls out to all women who suffer in silence with a life-affirming message of recovery. Meri Danquah rises from the pages, a true survivor, departing a world of darkness and reclaiming her life.” (Goodreads)

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12 Powerful Books About Depression

Stories to remind us we're not alone.

Though our attitudes toward mental illness are mostly changing for the good, there is still a lot we don’t know about depression, anxiety, and other disorders. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), nearly 1 in 5 US adults live with varying degrees of mental illness. And in 2017, only about 42.6 percent of affected adults received mental health services. In other words, it’s common to suffer from depression or anxiety, and even more common to not receive treatment for it.  

Whether or not you’ve struggled with similar mental illnesses, reading books about depression can be an enlightening way to better understand a disease that affects so many people. The authors listed here know what it’s like to suffer from this often-untreated illness, and opened up to the world in memoirs and novels about depression. Read about their personal struggles in the following books.

If you are contemplating suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Nonfiction Books About Depression

Memoirs and other nonfiction books about depression are some of the most intense stories you can read. The authors below have put their most personal and difficult struggles into words, sharing their most painful moments with the world.

Darkness Visible

By William Styron

In the summer of 1985, severe depression left William Styron hopeless and suicidal. His memoir centers on his hospitalization and subsequent road to recovery. Styron’s message reminds us that as bleak as it may seem, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. 

Regardless of your experience, Styron will stir up strong emotions—his utter candor is one of the things that makes this book so impactful. Darkness Visible provides deep insight into what it’s like to live with depression—insight that will resonate with survivors and help those who aren’t afflicted develop a greater understanding of the pain that depression sufferers are going through. 

Related: William Styron: A Life in Books  

Anne Sexton

By Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was an award-winning poet who committed suicide in 1974. After her death, Linda Gray Sexton, her daughter, and Lois Ames, one of her closest friends, compiled thousands of private letters she had written to friends, family, and fellow poets into a memoir. 

Anne Sexton: A Portrait in Letters tells the story of Anne Sexton’s life and reveals her inner thoughts and demons. Some letters discuss her perception of herself as a poet, while others catalog her relationship with her ex-husband. Sexton also writes of her fondness for her children and the despair at the loss of her parents, with her relentless depression appearing in some form throughout most of her letters. The series of letters paint a picture of an extremely talented yet troubled woman who loved, longed, and lost.

Want more powerful stories? Sign up for the Early Bird Books newsletter and get the best daily ebook deals delivered straight to your inbox.

The Black Veil

By Rick Moody

The road that brought Rick Moody to a psychiatric hospital was riddled with drugs and alcohol. In The Black Veil , he discusses his struggles with depression and alcoholism that led him to seek professional help. He begins his memoir back in the 1700s with a murderous and twisted relative whose story shaped Moody’s outlook on life. Moody’s memoir explores the stigmas that people with mental illness face and the pressure that society has put on individuals to feel ashamed.

Related: 7 Books to Help You Deal with Trauma

Reasons to Stay Alive

By Matt Haig

Matt Haig overcame his depression, and through his story the author highlights the importance of appreciating the little things. It’s those “little things” that give you a reason to stay alive, and in Haig’s case, teach you how to live. 

His recovery through reading, writing, and the love of his parents and his girlfriend is truly inspirational. By speaking honestly about the despair of depression, as well as adding a sense of humor, the author of The Humans and How to Stop Time creates a relatable book.

Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

By Sally Brampton

Winston Churchill was known to refer to depression as “the black dog.” In her memoir, Sally Brampton adopts a similar euphemism. Brampton launched Elle in 1985 and rose to fame as a talented magazine editor and award-winning journalist, but the world only saw one side of the accomplished writer. Inside, she was concealing her struggle with severe depression and alcoholism. 

In Shoot the Damn Dog , Brampton opens the floodgates and candidly shares her story about difficulties with depression and alcoholism. Throughout her book, Brampton seeks to offer practical advice to her readers—reassuring them that they are not to fault themselves for their illness.

Related: 10 Mental Health Memoirs From Writers Who Have Been There

Lost Connections

By Johann Hari

Johann Hari has spent most of his life struggling with depression. He began taking antidepressants when he was just a teenager, and as he grew older he grappled with the true cause of his illness. In Lost Connections , Hari investigates the causes of depression, both through his personal perspective and through a scientific lens. 

A New York Times best seller, the book has received accolades from the likes of Elton John and Hillary Clinton , who called Hari's book "A wonderful and insightful analysis of the depression and alienation that are haunting American society."

Related: 8 Books on Grief to Help You Handle a Loss  

Furiously Happy

By Jenny Lawson

Jenny Lawson’s tell-all about her battle with mental illness is told as a comedy. Lawson manages to make a story of hardship positively hilarious, providing new insight into what it is like to deal with mental illness. In Furiously Happy , she talks about coming to terms with the struggles of depression and about learning to be happy with who you are. 

It's a refreshing tale written directly to the reader, and Lawson succeeds in both taking her mental illness seriously and telling a ridiculously funny story .

This Close to Happy

By Daphne Merkin

In her memoir, Daphne Merkin explores the challenges that come with sharing a story of mental illness and seeking treatment. Merkin, who has suffered from severe depression for much of her life, openly shares intimate details about her three hospital stays and gives readers a window into her innermost thoughts. A story of coming to terms with mental illness, This Close to Happy brings a voice to people suffering from depression who may not otherwise be able to speak out.

Novels About Depression

Though there are many memoirs and nonfiction books about depression, fiction is another avenue authors often use to explore the unique struggles that come with mental illness. Below are some of the most touching novels that deal with feelings of sadness and anxiety.

Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets

By Evan Roskos

In this darkly humorous young adult book, protagonist James Whitman hates himself, but loves Walt Whitman. He’s been yawping at his abusive father ever since he kicked out Jorie, James’s beloved older sister, and dealing with his own struggles with anxiety and depression at the same time. Still, James manages to keep his sense of humor, and tries to love himself for who he is. 

“Author Roskos’s strength lies in his refusal to tidy up the mess in James’s life and in his relentless honesty about surviving with depression and anxiety" ( Horn Book ).

Related: 12 Books Like The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Play It as It Lays

By Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s most famous novel, Play It As It Lays is written from the point of view of Maria ("pronounced Mar-eye-ah") Wyeth, a former actress living in Hollywood. Maria comes off as cool and detached, and doesn’t seem to care about anything except her daughter, Kate, who is receiving treatment for an unknown mental condition. 

The book opens with Maria already in an institution herself, insisting that there are no reasons for anything, “there are only certain facts.” And as Maria lays out the facts of her own life, readers are taken into her psyche, and the choices and mind of a woman who is headed toward a breakdown.

Related: On Joan Didion: Her Books, Life and Legacy

Mrs. Dalloway

By Virginia Woolf

This modern classic novel set in England just after the first World War tells two simultaneous stories: first, that of Mrs. Dalloway, who is planning to host a party that evening; and second, of Septimus Warren Smith, a war veteran who is seeking treatment for PTSD. Of course, his doctors and wife believe there is nothing wrong with him. 

As the novel’s point of view switches back and forth between the two, Woolf manages to tell a tale that interweaves the differences among class (and how those in the upper class are often able to shield themselves from the issues facing lower classes), struggles with mental illness, and the near-impossibility of receiving proper treatment.

Virginia Woolf herself suffered from bipolar disorder and had received treatment at multiple asylums. In 1941, sixteen years after Mrs. Dalloway was published, Woolf died by suicide. 

The Bell Jar

By Sylvia Plath

This semi-autobiographical novel follows Esther Greenwood, a young woman from the Boston suburbs who becomes a summer intern for a New York City magazine in 1953. She should be having the time of her life—but instead, Esther is increasingly frightened and confused, a feeling that only worsens after she is assaulted, returns home, and realizes she doesn’t know what she wishes to do with her life. 

The Bell Jar is the only novel by Sylvia Plath, who mostly wrote poetry, including some beautiful love poems . She attempted suicide multiple times and may have struggled with depression or bipolar II disorder. Tragically, Sylvia Plath died by suicide about a month after the novel was released in the UK.

Related: Sylvia Plath's Lost Short Story, "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom"

Keep Reading:

The Best Sad Poetry Books

5 Moving Books on Death and Grief  

Sad Books for When You Need a Good Cry  

The 6 Best Books for Anxiety

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Make Your Own List

The best books on Depression

Recommended by bryony gordon.

Mad Girl by Bryony Gordon

Writing about her life in memoirs and a newspaper column allowed the author Bryony Gordon to "join the dots" to see the true face of her own mental illness. Here, she chooses five books to help with depression, books in which she has found solace and a sense of community among those who suffer from depression.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig

Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest

Heartburn by Nora Ephron

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

1 Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig

2 your voice in my head by emma forrest, 3 heartburn by nora ephron, 4 the bell jar by sylvia plath, 5 the heart is a lonely hunter by carson mccullers.

B efore we talk about books on depression, lets talk mental health—specifically, poor mental health—is an issue that is crucial to get people talking about more openly. Do you see talking about your own personal experiences as at the heart of that?

And when you give words to a mental illness, it has less power over you. So from the moment I discovered that there was this condition called obsessive compulsive disorder, I knew that this was probably what it was, and that I wasn’t dying. I wasn’t terminally ill or a serial killer. What I’ve learned over the years is that I kept this all buried inside me and dealt with it by self medicating with drugs and alcohol and all the rest.

Then when I got to 34 and I had a child of my own, and a husband, I got really ill again, and I felt like, why am I keeping quiet about this? I’m a writer who writes endlessly about the things that go on in my life. I wrote a book about men snorting cocaine off my breasts and terrible sexual encounters and whatnot, called The Wrong Knickers and I realised that at no point had I ever felt able to talk about the background a bit, which was obsessive compulsive disorder. So when I got ill after my daughter was born, I was like: enough is enough. I am not going to give this condition the power it wants by staying silent about it.

So I started to write about it in the Telegraph  and it was as if the floodgate opened. And I realised that by simply putting down the stuff that was going on in my head, it was helpful to other people. And it was also helpful to me, because once you get it down in black and white, it is literally out of your head. If that makes sense?

Absolutely.

I think that sharing stories of mental illness is really, really important because the thing that all mental illnesses have in common is that they lie to you. They tell you you are a freak. I always say that if mental illness was a politician, it will be Nigel Farage. It wouldn’t be nice to you. It tells you you’re a freak, and it tells you you are weird, and it tells you nobody else feels the same way that you do. And… that’s just bullshit.

Sorry, that’s not very scholarly use of language.

But it is true.

People do feel the same way as you. And what I learned when I started to write about my own mental illness was that it is through all the people who then started to write to me—hundreds of people saying: ‘me too’, if not with OCD, then other forms of mental illness—I realised that it was actually very normal to feel weird. To me, that is why it is so important to talk about your experience in mental illness no matter how shameful it may feel at the time because not only do you then show people what mental illness is, you also give it less power over yourself.

I wonder: what is the link between obsessive compulsive disorder and depression?

That’s a good question, and one that people often ask. They’re standalone conditions, but obviously there is a co-morbidity. I mean, I certainly feel that a long spell of OCD will leave me very depressed. But I don’t know. It is the chicken and the egg question; I don’t know which one leads to which, but for me they are very intertwined. One feeds the other.

Do you think that people should have more sympathy, particularly at work? That it should be taken more seriously in terms of giving people the time to recover?

Absolutely. Although, the funny thing is that sometimes you do need to get out of bed and go to work. Sometimes staying at home and lying in bed all day can be the least helpful thing.

But sometimes, if your body needs to rest. I don’t think we should beat ourselves for those lost days, as I call them: days where you can’t remember. Because it layers one thing over another. You feel bad during them, firstly, and then you feel bad for feeling bad. I think it is really important to be able to put your hand up and say: ‘I’m not feeling well today. I need this day at home. I need to be cared for by my family.’ Or, ‘I need you to say lovely things to me.’ That is really important.

Or to ask for practical help: therapy. I’m very lucky that I have access to a private healthcare scheme through my employer, so I can get free therapy through that.

It is really important that people put their hands up when they feel like they are drowning. I find that writing what’s going on in my head down, putting that down, can be really helpful as well.

Yes. I also have a similar experience of processing what is happening in my life through the medium of writing. I wonder if that too might be something that unites the authors of the books that help with depression that you have picked in this list: writing as a form of self-therapy?

Yes, I think that is. In my own example—not that I want to compare myself to Sylvia Plath , or Carson McCullers—for me, until writing  Mad Girl, I hadn’t linked the alcohol abuse, the drug abuse, the bulimia. I didn’t link it together until I wrote it all down and then it was like I was able to come and join all the dots. It was an incredibly painful process: who knew that writing about mental illness will make you mentally ill?

So it was a really necessary process, and I feel now a lot further down the path of self-knowledge, or self-care, because of it. I’m not fully there.

I’m sorry to hear that.

I wonder if perhaps we might turn to Matt Haig’s book, Reasons to Stay Alive ? I know that many people say that they have found great solace in this book. Why do you recommend it as a book for depression?

When you are depressed, when you are experiencing mental illness, you find it very difficult to read. Any kind of enjoyable cultural activity becomes hard because your concentration tends to go. So if you are confronted by a doorstop [of a book] you just want to take a diazepam and go back to sleep.  And if you can’t even bring yourself to pick up a book and read because you are so lost in your own head, then they’re not going to help you.

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The great thing about Reasons to Stay Alive —apart from the fact that it is brilliantly written, and apart from the fact that it is a really amazing portrayal of being suicidal, and apart from the fact that it is a book that really chimes with people—is that it is an easy book, in a depressive state of mind, to dip in and out of, and find that solace.

Matt’s book came out in 2015, and I was just starting to write about my own mental illness at the time, and I felt that the book gave me the courage to talk about my own stuff. I keep it on my bedside table. You know how they have the Bible in all hotel room drawers? Well they should have Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive.

Do you have a favourite part?

The thing for me that really resonated was the part where he is on the beach in Ibiza with his girlfriend. He just suddenly finds himself more… well, it really captures how these feelings can just come out of nowhere. What I really admire about Matt, and about all of these writers, is that I find with these very painful times, that—a bit like child birth—I will have whole months of my life that I just don’t remember because I was in a kind of fug of mental illness. So it’s very difficult to pick those moments out of it. And he’s done that so brilliantly and with such clarity. It is life affirming and important. Really important.

You mean Your Voice in My Head , your second choice? Can you tell us a bit about that book for depression?

I read this when I was in my late twenties. I’ve always really admired Emma Forrest as a writer and as a young journalist. She was one of those super-talented young girls who started writing for newspapers when she was about seventeen.

It is a kind of eulogy to her dead psychiatrist. He died when he was 53 [of lung cancer, without having told Forrest of his illness]. So, his voice is in her head. It describes the beauty of therapy and the importance of it. She tried to commit suicide and he kind of brought her back from that. I always say that finding a good therapist is like finding a good boyfriend or girlfriend. It’s such an important relationship. And to think of having that suddenly taken away from you…  But, also, it wasn’t her relationship to mourn in a way. It was his family who needed to mourn.

It is, I suppose, a very unusual professional relationship. Because you are baring yourself to this person, emotionally. It is not a normal doctor-patient relationship. And it is one-sided.

Yes! They know everything about you, and then you find that you know very little about them.

But it is a memoir , a memoir of her experiences and her relationships. It’s unsparing. And she really, really, really captures, for me, that kind of madness in failing relationships. While also being very very stark and honest about it. For example, she had a relationship with [the actor] Colin Farrell. And she writes a lot about New York and Los Angeles, and it really comes alive.

But it is about heartbreak, obsession… the place that we women are ashamed to go to. When it comes to the end of relationships, it can get a bit obsessive and she is not afraid to go there and write it for what it is.

You highlight her honesty—and that’s something very striking about your own books. Baring yourself in that way must be a very difficult thing to do. Do you think that that’s important for other people going through the same thing, to have that almost brutal honesty?

It’s a different approach to that of Nora Ephron, in Heartburn . There she processes real-life events [Ephron’s then-husband, Carl Bernstein, had an extra-marital affair while she was pregnant] but she subverts it by making it a comedy.

I think it is very empowering. She goes through all this terrible stuff, then at the end [spoiler alert:] she shoves a cake in her husband’s face. It’s all about her coming up. It’s really important to have humour.

Heartburn isn’t strictly a book about depression. It’s a book about heartbreak and failing marriage and all that stuff. But what I really like about it is that it is really very funny—horrible things are happening to her, but it’s very funny—and it is really important to find humour in the bleakest of moments, wherever possible. Certainly, when I was writing Mad Girl , I didn’t want it to be a misery memoir. There’s a hundred billion misery memoirs out there, but what I wanted this to be was an upbeat book about depression, and it’s perfectly possible to do that.

Again, it’s about taking control over what’s in your head. Everyone loves  Heartburn,  don’t they?   No one who’s read  Heartburn hasn’t been like: ‘I love Nora Ephron, and what the hell was Carl Bernstein thinking?’ She takes something really negative and turns it into a massive positive, and I think that’s fucking awesome. And she makes everyone laugh along the way, and I think that’s what writing should really be about. These terrible things happen to all of us, so why don’t we all just get together and laugh collectively about them.

You can cry about them too! It’s like when you’re with a girlfriend who has just broken up with her boyfriend. She’s crying, but then you start joking about how awful he was, or that thing he did: and wasn’t he really a total douchebag? It’s a very human thing, trying to find humour in the depths of despair, and it is always there. It is always there.

There’s that special kind of laughter when you start off crying, but then somebody says something to make you laugh at the same time—

It’s almost a hysteria, isn’t it?

But also on a very practical level, it is a lovely cookbook . I just think it is the most charming, engaging, funny, lovely, edible book. It is an edible book in more ways than one. I think it gives hope. Hope is really important, when you are going through something like a heartbreak or a divorce.

Well, next on your books on depression list comes Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar . That goes to the other extreme, doesn’t it?

I know. You can’t have five books about depression and not mention The Bell Jar . I first read it when I was a teenager.

As a teenage girl, you have to read  The Bell Jar. It’s a rite of passage. I was about 16 or 17. I thought I was really cool, multilayered. It’s the seminal novel about depression, isn’t it? It is literally about that feeling: of being stuck underneath a bell jar.

The really fascinating thing about The Bell Jar is the way that mental illness used to be treated. Well, it still is treated with electroconvulsive therapy. That is quite shocking to read about. But there is also an undercurrent about the patriarchy — she doesn’t just want to be a housewife or a mum. She wants to be more expressive than that. There’s so many layers to it.

Behind it of course is the tragedy of what happened to Sylvia Plath. I called my book Mad Girl partly for her poem ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’, which is also the inscription:

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

I do remember as teenager reading it, that description of what it feels like to be depressed, which is probably the first time I’d read something and thought, oh, hang on. Obviously I wasn’t in a mental institution, having electroconvulsive therapy, but it was around that time I started having any kind of awareness that perhaps something wasn’t quite right. And an awareness that perhaps this was something other people went through as well.

When I first read this book, as a teenager, I remember an English teacher telling me: ‘I don’t like Sylvia Plath, because of the effect it has on girls like you.’ I think what she meant by that was that it was somehow glamorising extreme depression. Do you worry about that, with Sylvia Plath’s writing, and story?

I don’t think it glamorises it. She ends up committing suicide. What your teacher said about ‘girls’: it’s a way of boxing us up again, isn’t it? What I think is that she [Plath] made it very clear to girls like us that you didn’t just have to be good girls who became wives, and that it was normal to have all of these feelings. You summed it up perfectly there: “girls like you.” Most women are girls like us. I think it gives voice to that.

I don’t think it glamorises it at all, do you?

I think that she was glamorous, but I don’t think that  The Bell Jar  is glamorous. I think  The Bell Jar  is very bleak.

Yes. I don’t think anyone who has gone through that—who has had the bell jar there on top of them—would think there is anything glamorous about that. As you say, it is incredibly bleak.

Shall we move on to Carson McCullers?

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter , the book, is another classic. She was 22 when she wrote it! Carson McCullers was a white woman, writing about black America, which is quite astonishing in many ways. She wrote about what it was to be an outcast, a misfit, to be depressed, to be lonely. She wrote about loneliness with such brilliance. But she had a sad life. She died of alcoholism in her fifties.

The thing that was special in Carson McCullers, for me, is that when I get ill, I run. I don’t run massive distances but I run. And I listen to documentaries and stuff. I was listening, earlier this year, to a documentary about Carson McCullers while running, and it was fascinating. But what was most fascinating and literally stopped me in my track was this archive audio recording of her. She said: “Sometimes it feels like everyone is part of a ‘we’ except for me.”

I was like, ‘You were wrong! You were part of a we, but you didn’t know it.’ But she created the we inside her books.

I felt that no one had ever said anything that quite chimed with me like that. The result of that was that I went home and thought: I’m going to find my we. And I went on Twitter, and said: “Who wants to join a mental health walking group? We’ll call it Mental Health Mates. ” And eight months on we have several thousand members, and walks all over the country, and I have found my we. And that’s all thanks to what Carson McCullers said however many decades ago.

So that’s why she is very important to me. She’s sums up the need to find your we.

Have you felt that you’ve had a warm response to your own book?

Yes, it is really amazing. What I wanted was that by sharing my own experiences, people would feel able to share theirs. I don’t know how many emails or tweets or letters I’ve had saying ‘I appreciate exactly what you have written.’ That’s the sentence that I hear: ‘You could have written that about me.’ And I think: this is collective.

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I think books are really important because they’re just quietly there. You can quietly identify with someone. There’s a trade-off between you and the person in the book, you’re having a relationship with that person without anyone else knowing, and you can find solace and comfort in that. I think that, to me, is the most incredible thing about writing the book. Forget about critics. The most incredible feedback you can get is ‘I felt as though you were talking to me’ or ‘talking about me,’ and that’s the thing any writer is aiming to do, isn’t it?

It’s having an affinity with someone. If people have an affinity with you through your book, that’s amazing. That’s so much what I felt like I had with Emma Forrest, with Matt Haig… all of these authors.

Do you ever find that readers of your books feel like they know you better than they do?

They do think that they know me. And they kind of do. I think that if you are going to write an honest book you’ve got to write an honest book.

So they do basically know me, and what I’m like. They may not know every single secret in my head, or everything in my head. But I think that if people think they know you, that’s a good thing.

It’s not something to be scared of. People are really scared of that. They say, ‘I want to keep this for myself.” Well, why? Why? I mean I could understand if you were Madonna or someone, and you wanted to keep a bit of privacy, but I find we are really in the cult of being mysterious and not over-sharing. It’s never ‘sharing’, it’s ‘over-sharing’. All sharing is seen as over-sharing. We have a very British stiff upper lip attitude: keep things to yourself, just get on with it. And I just think that’s bollocks.

I don’t mind that people think they know me, or that people don’t like me, at all. More people should feel able just to be themselves. There’s no joy in being misunderstood, is there?

October 6, 2016

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Bryony Gordon is a British newspaper columnist and the author of two bestselling memoirs, The Wrong Knickers and Mad Girl .

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Memoirs On Depression: Autobiographical Writings On The Illness That Affects Millions (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

Today, Oct. 7, is National Depression Screening Day . It is held annually during Mental Illness Awareness Week , and more than half a million people have been screened each year for depression since 1991. Depression affects about nineteen million people in the U.S. each year. Here, we've collected the memoirs of a few who have shared their struggles in an effort to raise awareness.

As the stories of those from renowned writer William Styron to expert psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison have shown, no walk of life, level of education, or career path makes one immune to the potentially crippling effects of this illness. Whether it was clinical depression, manic depression, or postpartum depression, learn how these people spoke out about coping with a mental illness that historically comes with a great deal of stigma attached.

WATCH Jamison discuss her friendship with Styron in a video courtesy of Open Road Media :

Which memoir looks most compelling to you?

Memoirs of Depression

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• J Undergrad Neurosci Educ
• v.17(1); Fall 2018

Six Autobiographies and Two Realistic Fiction Books as Tools to Engage Students in Neurobiology of Disease: A Guide for Instructors

Gates k. palissery.

1 Psychology Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

2 Neuroscience Program, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

3 Biology Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

4 Department of Physiology, Northwestern University, Chicago IL 60611

Amanda Kuhn

5 Georgetown University School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Meredyth A. Wegener

6 Neuroscience Department and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Associated Data

In this review, we discuss seven books, which we have utilized as compliments to textbooks in a Neurobiology of Disease course. These books describe neurological and psychiatric disorders from the viewpoint of the patient and include both fiction and nonfiction. We incorporate these texts in our course to engage a wide variety of students. For neuroscience and psychology students, these texts provide a more humanized view of the disease or disorder and a context for descriptions of symptoms or treatments. For students who take the course to fulfill a general education requirement, these texts are meant to make complex issues in science feel more accessible and relatable. Additionally, class discussion of these books facilitates the de-stigmatization of mental health issues. Here we present reviews of various books we have used in this approach and describe the educational value of each. We highlight the reasons why each book was chosen and identify particularly relevant or challenging sections of each book. We also offer points of consideration to aid educators in evaluating whether a book is appropriate for use in their own classrooms.

For the past 4 years, we have supplemented the textbook material ( Meyer & Quenzer, 2013 ; Zigmond et al., 2014 ) in our regularly-offered Neurobiology of Disease course with autobiographical accounts written by patients who have some of the diseases that we teach about. We also use two realistic fiction stories written from the perspective of individuals with diseases we cover. Previously, guides for instructors have been created for how to incorporate original research (see Harrington et al., 2015 ), short patient case studies ( Handelsman et al., 2004 ; Herreid et al., 2012 ; Wiertelak et al., 2016 ; Prud’homme-Généreux, 2016 ; Cook-Snyder, 2017 ), or cinema (see Wiertelak, 2002 ; Boyatzis 1994 ) in college classes. Our goal is to provide a similar instructor’s guide to include longer, book-format autobiographies and fictional accounts of patients. In creating this review, we share how we use autobiographies and novels as well as provide specific assignments and general ideas for instructors who wish to use autobiographies (either those we use or others) in their classes.

Substantial research has demonstrated that students learn best when they are able to connect material to relevant stories, including their own life experiences and/or interpersonal narratives ( Ambrose et al., 2010 ; Aoun, 2017 ). Additionally, it has been shown that presenting students with case studies and personal stories helps them excel in challenging, original research-oriented classes ( Cooke-Snyder, 2017 ). We are inspired, in part by research showing that biographical portrayals of scientists improve overall grades in science classes for all students ( Schinske et al., 2016 ; Hoh, 2009 ).

Here, we review relevant aspects of the stories we use, how they are used, the value they provide, and other considerations related to their use in a classroom setting. Our hope is that these accounts will allow other instructors to make informed decisions about the value of including either these specific books or other such resources in their classes. All the books we have required and/or recommended for our students can be seen on the sample course syllabus ( Supplementary Materials 1 ). Although there are eight books we review here, we cycle through topics and therefore through these books, typically requiring 3–5 books per semester. For each required book, we assigned questions for the students to complete ( Supplementary Material 2 ). On the day each assignment is due, we spend 30–50 minutes in class discussing the book in question.

For each book, we report how they are used in our class as well as instructional considerations and homework questions we assign students ( Supplementary Material 2 ). In this course, the readings account for a small fraction of the final course grade (about 2% of total course grade from these homeworks and 2% of course grade for participation in discussions). The exams in the course assess student knowledge about the diseases being studied and about experimental evidence and methods used to study the diseases in human patients and in animal models, not the books. However, we believe from our time in class and interactions with students that the students find these stories to be interesting and valuable in deepening their understanding of the diseases and in motivating them to learn the course material.

Our approach is not totally novel, as others have presented review and recommendations on the use of biographies in classrooms ( King, 1987 ; Solas 1992 ; Powers, 1998 ; Lom 2005 ; Mori & Larson 2006 ; Monuszko 2014 ). Additionally, several sources have used cinematic portrayals in pedagogical contexts in neurobiology and psychology courses to help students make a connection with neuroscience or biology material ( Hyler & Moore, 1996 ; Wedding & Boyd, 1999 ; Stewart & Chudler, 2002 ; Wiertelak, 2002 ; Mead, 2007 ; Chamany et al., 2008 ), and comic books have also been used similarly ( Hosler & Boomer, 2011 ). Relevant to those who wish to supplement their teaching with cinematic portrayals, three of the books we review here have since been made into movies ( Front of the Class , Still Alice , and Brain on Fire ) and one has been made into a play ( The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ). In the context of books related to neuroscience of diseases, several reviews of individual books are available for instructors to draw on (see: Bernd, 2002 and Hales, 2003 ).

Our primary goal in using these books is to motivate students to learn about the biology of these diseases and provide a human context for them. Often, authors of memoirs and realistic fiction write with the intention of educating the general public about their experiences while also informing people who have these diseases about the challenges, realities, and successes they have had in their lives ( Steele & Berman, 2001 ; Cohen & Wysocky, 2005 ; Wortmann, 2012 ; Alter, 2017 ).

Savvy students (and instructors) will note in our syllabus ( Supplementary Material 1 ) that student engagement with the books is not required to earn a good grade in the course. We should be clear that understanding the life stories of people with the disease is not an explicit learning objective of our course. Students know they will not be tested on the life stories of the people in the books and they may, if they wish, just read or skim enough to answer the pre-discussion questions. Despite this, more than half the students raise points in discussions that go beyond the minimum amount needed to complete the assignments. Also, judging from conversations with students and from formal course evaluations, at least 10–20% of our students choose to read the entire book, and a large majority find the books and discussions to be valuable even if they may not read every one entirely.

Enrollment varies by semester from 20 (in summers) to 50 (in the academic year). In early offerings with this format, we engaged the entire class in discussion. Because of the number of students, this format kept us from ensuring all students participated. In more recent offerings, we have broken the discussion time into smaller groups of 8–12 students, with graduate TA’s and/or trained undergraduate discussion facilitators to lead the sessions. Although we don’t have direct measures, our own observations and course evaluations indicate that the value gained in inspiring students to be curious about neurobiology is worth the work on their part (and ours) in reading and discussing these memoirs and fictional accounts.

Paradoxically, by not using strong grade-based incentives, we seem to succeed in motivating many students to read the books for their own sake. We are upfront with the students that the purpose is to provide them with interesting and relevant personal accounts to motivate them to learn the biology of the diseases and that we hope that they choose to read the books for the intrinsic enjoyment the books provide. While some students only read the bare minimum, these students still gain a small window into the life of someone with each disease. Even with heterogeneity in student engagement, the value the books provide is apparent to us in the in-class discussions as well as in conversations with students.

IMPORTANT CAVEATS

We are not physicians or licensed mental health professionals. In this review, we discuss briefly how we handle discussions with students about mental health and other sensitive issues. Before adopting any of the teaching practices we describe here, we strongly advise that instructors consult their institution’s student support services and make sure all guidelines are followed. Additionally, instructors should seek out guidance from mental health professionals, consider having such professionals attend class, and they may wish to seek training in mental health first aid ( National Council for Behavioral Health, 2018 ).

Furthermore, making available a clinician to answer student questions about suicidal ideation and dramatization can be crucial. It is also important for clinicians to discuss that people can have suicidal ideation but not have attempts. Ideation or even dramatic behaviors of self-harm without attempts may serve as coping strategies until patients receive proper care. A major concern for clinicians is the graphical depiction or glamorization of suicide in the media. On the other hand, discussing and normalizing the concept that these thoughts can occur helps, as does normalizing the need to seek professional help (J. Schreiber, M.D., personal communication). One of us (DJB) has also spoken to the class about his own experience with mental illness in order to help normalize such discussions ( Brasier, 2016 ).

This review represents our own individual practices and does not necessarily reflect the practices or policies of our home institutions, and neither have our practices nor this article have been reviewed or endorsed in any way by our home institutions. Talking about mental health can be helpful for students when done effectively and appropriately ( American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 2018 ). However, when done without proper training or without consultation with licensed care-givers, it can result in unintended negative consequences and potentially put students at risk for serious, possibly life-threatening complications.

In our syllabi, we also tell students that class discussions are not an appropriate time for group therapy ( Supplementary Material 1 ). In discussing what this means with students, we say something along the lines of:

“To ensure that all students are able to focus on the course material, any personal experiences should be de-identified in class discussions and all students should refrain from offering personal advice or recommendations about private mental health concerns. Remember that while we ask all students to be respectful of one another, confidentiality cannot be guaranteed.”

In other words, we explicitly encourage students that if they want to share an experience about a sibling, friend, etc., that they just say “someone I know”, even if it’s about themselves. In addition to protecting confidentiality, this also ensures that discussions focus primarily on the biology of the diseases and the relationship between neurobiology and disease symptoms.

Lastly, it is likely in a class of 30 or more students that one or more individuals will have experienced serious psychological condition within any given thirty-day period, and there is an even greater likelihood that some students will be in active treatment or still be recovering ( CDC, 2017 ). We believe that the loosely structured discussion time for each story helps students think through the emotionally challenging material. We spend time before each discussion considering how to ensure all students’ voices are heard and how to positively reframe any comments that may be off-putting to other students in the class. This raises the risk that some students may be in a position where reading vivid accounts of mental illnesses, especially suicidal thoughts and/or traumatic life events (including rape in one book – The Day the Voices Stopped ) might work against the students’ best medical interests. In order to mitigate the possibility of this, we provide students with advanced information about the potentially triggering aspects of each book and with information about local and national mental health support services (see last page of Supplementary Material 1 ). We also provide every student the option to opt out of any assigned reading (see second-to-last page of Supplementary Material 1 ). Students are not asked to describe their reason for opting out, and opting out of one or more readings has no impact on their course grade as students are not tested on material from the books. Any book could, in principle, be contraindicated for a student, but the most likely are Triggered , The Day the Voices Stopped , An Unquiet Mind , or The Noonday Demon ( Wortmann, 2012 ; Steele & Berman, 2001 ; Jamison, 1995 ; Solomon, 2001 ).

ALTERNATIVE BOOKS

To be fair to all students, we require that a student who opts out of one reading instead choose from a menu of other possible books or suggest a book on their own, with ad hoc homeworks and brief discussion with the instructor about the substitute book chosen. The menu of books we offer to students includes:

• - The Ghost in My Brain: How a Concussion Stole My Life and How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Helped Me Get It Back ( Elliot, 2015 ), which describes concussions and traumatic brain injuries. This book includes significant discussion of advances in neurological treatments.
• - Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness ( Styron, 1990 ), which is a frank account of depression and includes significant reference to suicide but can be empowering for individuals with mental illness because it is widely credited as having launched efforts for public awareness of mental illness ( Fulham, 2014 ).
• - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death ( Bauby & Leggatt, 1997 ), which describes locked-in syndrome.
• - ADHD and Me: What I Learned from Lighting Fires at the Dinner Table ( Taylor & Honos-Webb, 2007 ), an autobiography of ADHD in adolescence.
• - Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions ( Barry, 2009 ), an autobiography written by a neuroscientist about her own experience with strabismus and late-in-life development of stereovision. This book also provides a great introduction to critical periods in sensory systems and we recommend it for classes in systems neuroscience.
• - Heal Thyself: A Doctor at the Peak of His Medical Career, Destroyed by Alcohol – and the Personal Miracle That Brought Him Back ( Ameisen, 2009 ), an autobiography of a physician who goes against medical advice to use baclofen to treat and recover from alcohol dependence. This book does include periods of inpatient psychiatric care, as well as a good introduction to neuropharmacology written for a lay audience.
• - Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H. M. ( Corkin, 2013 , reviewed by Monuszko, 2014 ).
• - Instructors wishing to have shorter biographical accounts may consider the works of Oliver Sacks, (e.g., The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Ha t, Sacks, 1998 ).

Each of the above books has its own considerations, which we do not review here, and this list is by no means exhaustive. Some of the books we review below are fairly “safe” in that they have a low likelihood to cause unintended challenges for students who have experienced mental illness personally or in close family and friends ( Cohen & Wysocky, 2005 ; Haddon, 2003 ; Genova, 2007 ; Cahalan, 2013 ). We recommend that the menu of options appropriate for a course be provided to students who opt out of any reading. These options should be provided in time for the student to consider substitutions on their own and consult with health providers if they wish.

One final consideration and caveat that students should be aware of is that each story is one example and that the same disease may have different courses and outcomes in different patients. Related to this, it should be made clear which stories are fictional and that the memoirs represent one person’s own perspective on their own disease, which may at times be unreliable (see Söderlund et al., 2014 ).

REVIEWS OF BOOKS WE RECOMMEND

Triggered: a memoir of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Fletcher Wortmann (2012) Disease or Disorder: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Genre: Memoir

Fletcher Wortmann describes his childhood and college years living with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). From the beginning of his story, Wortmann’s symptoms were not stereotypical, visible compulsions like frequent handwashing. Instead, he experienced violent intrusive thoughts, such as ideas about a coming apocalypse, intrusive sexual thoughts, and religious fears about punishments by God for specific actions.

In the introduction to his memoir, Wortmann points out that his OCD was misdiagnosed as depression when he was in high school; it wasn’t until he had an emotional breakdown in college that he was properly diagnosed with OCD and treated for it. The memoir then opens with a thought experiment designed to convey aspects of the thought process that defines OCD. The remainder of the chapter describes Wortmann’s childhood and how that created the basis for his disorder. Even at a young age, Wortmann had frequently changing obsessions that resulted in him creating massive collections of both knowledge and tangible items, and a constant obsession with the apocalypse. Religion played a role in Wortmann’s life, creating a focus for many of his obsessions and directly affecting his lifestyle. By the time he was in third grade, Wortmann experienced his first “full-blown bout of OCD”.

In high school, Fletcher Wortmann experienced suicidal impulses as an extension of, in his words, his intrusive thoughts. It was at this time that he was diagnosed with depression and prescribed antidepressants. The bulk of the memoir examines Wortmann’s experiences in college with sex, close interpersonal relationships and OCD. He begins a relationship with a girl who has her own mental health problems, and how that relationship exacerbates his OCD. By the time their relationship ends, he says, “There was only the obsession.”

Interestingly, Wortmann’s physicians never diagnosed him with OCD until after he learned about the disease and diagnosed himself; which was later confirmed by a different medical professional. Shortly after his diagnosis, Wortmann held a razor to his wrist and began to cut himself. His mother found him with the razor at his wrist and had him admitted to a psychiatric hospital to receive treatment. The remainder of the memoir describes in (often graphic) detail the difficulties in treating his OCD with exposure response prevention therapy. Wortmann’s symptoms do not completely disappear, but the focus of his obsessions changed from violent intrusive thoughts to obsession about obsession. In the end, Wortmann graduated college, continued therapy, and became a part-time tutor and writer.

Value and Considerations

One of the values in reading this memoir is the honesty with which Wortmann writes. He uses language that is accessible to the layman instead of complex medical terms. This honesty lends itself to the genuine tone of the story; the reader understands that these experiences actually happened, and it puts a proverbial face to the disorder. In addition, Wortmann uses humor to his advantage – for example, describing his childhood cat as “mounds of doughy flesh.” Some of the humor is dark, particularly towards the end of the memoir, so readers should be aware that this book is not meant to be funny. The memoir is particularly accessible for many college students as most of the events depicted happened to Wortmann while he was in college. Because of this, students have reported to us that the college student perspective makes the story feel more relevant to them.

However, one of the more negative aspects of this memoir is the bitter tone in which it is written and the large amount of vulgarity in the book. Early in Wortmann’s description of his symptoms, he says that he “will not allow the disorder to sterilize my writing.” The first example of this is when Wortmann recounts his suicidal impulses as a high school student. His brusque and unsympathetic language, while not necessarily graphic, may leave an acrid taste in the reader’s mouth. More sensitive readers may also find some descriptions Wortmann uses disturbing, such as how he talks about his girlfriend’s self-harm, scars, and eating disorder, as well as multiple detailed descriptions of his own suicidal ideation. Another negative aspect to this book is how heartbreaking it is at some points; for example, Wortmann loses multiple family pets over the course of the memoir. While they weren’t major characters, they were important to him, and their deaths are written poignantly enough that readers empathize with how sad the situation was.

Students who themselves have personal or close interpersonal experience with mental illness may find that these accounts hit too close to home. There is a risk that this memoir may cause the students to experience an unwelcome (and possibly unhealthy) reliving of past or ongoing challenges. As described above, we therefore allow students to excuse themselves from the reading either before they start or after they have begun, and substitute another book that is less likely to be clinically significant for them (see “Important Caveats” and “Alternative Books” above).

The Day the Voices Stopped: A Memoir of Madness and Hope

Ken Steele, Jr. and Claire Berman (2001) Disease or Disorder: Schizophrenia Genre: Memoir

Ken Steele was a publicly influential mental health advocate until he passed away in 2000. In the latter years of his life he consulted with medical professionals and politicians about mental health treatment and policy ( Goode, 2000 ). The Day the Voices Stopped is his memoir, written late in his life and published a few months after his death at age 51. In the book, he describes his initial schizophrenic break in high school. Steele experienced significant and worsening auditory hallucinations that included multiple voices which berated him and urged him to take his own life. He also recounts the unfortunate response from his parents who didn’t understand what he was going through and broke off contact with him for years.

As a young adult with schizophrenia and no family connection, Steele found himself lost in New York City. He spent years as a male prostitute, during which time he was abused and raped numerous times, stories which he recounts in significant (but not pornographic) detail. Through this narrative, the reader is brought into the terrorizing life Steele led. Although Steele had some healthy friends and personal supporters at times, a large amount of his time was spent homeless or in halfway houses. He also suffered in poorly run mental hospitals in which he spent much time restrained and over- or mis-medicated.

During a time when he was out of a hospital, Steele, with some deception (for which he felt guilty), landed a job as an assistant cook at a small private club. Although he was still plagued by voices, Steele was able to slowly rebuild a life for himself. He realized, however, that he couldn’t fully function without proper professional care, so he returned to one of the inpatient facilities where he had previously been treated, now under new direction and with caregivers who provided better care for his condition.

With the help of his new physicians and therapists, Steele was able to quiet the voices in his head. As described in his obituary, “Mr. Steele was best known as the founder and publisher of New York City Voices, a newspaper focusing on mental health issues, and as the creator of the Mental Health Voter Empowerment Project, a national effort to register the mentally ill, who are often ignored by politicians” ( Goode, 2000 ). Towards the end of the book, he describes his reconciliation with his family and emphasizes that though much work is needed to change public perceptions of mental illness, he is optimistic about the future.

This memoir is, in many ways, the most difficult for us as a teaching tool. There are many risks involved and considerations to be mindful of.

First, students reading this story are likely to, at times, be pessimistic about the state of mental health care, particularly after reading the descriptions of Steele’s early institutionalization. Although Steele describes the many changes that psychiatry has seen in the last few decades, we still recommend that, if possible, instructors take time to bring in professionals from local inpatient clinics to discuss the reality of inpatient psychiatric care. This may avoid propagating negative perceptions about inpatient care, especially in case students may find themselves in need of psychiatric care during or after their college careers. In addition, this effort to demystify and destigmatize inpatient psychiatric care can be valuable for students who may have peers in need of such care, thus providing a more supportive community environment surrounding psychiatric care (J. Schreiber, M.D., personal communication).

Second, it is important to provide an honest depiction of life with mental illness through various degrees of recovery. While Steele’s story is particularly poignant, it is not necessarily the only course for someone with schizophrenia. Instructors are encouraged to partner with in-patient care providers to allow a more accurate and modern picture of psychiatric care to be discussed in class (J. Schreiber, M.D., personal communication).

Third, like Triggered , this book features frank accounts of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. For students who have lost someone to suicide or who themselves are living with mental illness that includes suicidal thoughts or past attempts, reading this book may not be appropriate. Additionally, the account of rape may not be appropriate for students who have personal history or know someone who has been a victim of sexual assault. Students should be made aware of these considerations before reading the book, and decisions about whether it is appropriate should be made by the student and their health care provider (without a requirement to explain why to the instructor).

Despite these significant considerations, this book has the potential to dispel many myths about schizophrenia. Steele’s ultimate recovery from a life spent homeless, hospitalized or in halfway houses, to a respected public figure can be valuable to some students who are concerned about the effect of their own mental illnesses on their lives. Additionally, because it is likely that every student will know someone with mental illness, the frank characterizations provided in this book help remind students to be aware of their interactions with others. Despite the many considerations, this is the one book that we feel best accomplishes our goals in teaching with memoirs and realistic fiction: helping students see a human side to unfamiliar or misunderstood diseases and motivating them to learn more about the biology of the disorders we teach.

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Kay Redfield Jamison (1995) Disease or disorder: Bipolar Disorder Genre: Memoir

Though she suffered mood swings throughout her life, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison was not diagnosed with bipolar I disorder (then called manic depression) until she was an assistant professor in psychiatry at UCLA and experienced severe manic and depressive episodes. The prologue to her memoir outlines her illness and the consequences she and others like her face. As a child, Dr. Jamison was incredibly “mercurial”. She was initially diagnosed with depression in adolescence, which she points out is a common erroneous diagnosis that many patients with bipolar get early in life. When she went to college, her mood swings started to become more severe, often affecting her school work and lifestyle. The bulk of her memoir tracks her life from this time to publication.

She faced immense challenges as she initially refused treatment or did not follow recommended doses for her medication. As time passed and her mood swings became more severe and disruptive, she began to take lithium, the standard treatment for bipolar disorder. Her illness contributed to her separation and divorce from her husband, though he remained a supportive figure in her life. During her manic periods, Dr. Jamison spent exorbitant amounts of money, resulting in financial troubles, and become extremely hyperactive, getting only a couple hours of sleep a day, spending the rest of her time reading research papers or trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to write her own papers.

Dr. Jamison’s depressive episodes were as dangerous as her manic periods. During one particularly bad depressive episode, she became violent and attempted suicide; she did not die from this attempt, though it did take her a while to recover from it. A recurring thread through the memoir is Jamison’s struggles with taking her medication consistently. Later in the memoir, she directly addresses medication and how important it is for patients with bipolar disorder to maintain their medication and therapy regimen, lest they fall back into the swings of mania and depression. At the time her memoir was published, Dr. Jamison had some control over her illness, thanks to treatment, and had established her career as a researcher who studies mood disorders.

One of the great benefits of this memoir is the clinical perspective that Dr. Jamison brings to it. Her dual perspective as both a patient and clinical researcher bridges a common misperception that some students have – that a clinician cannot really understand what a patient is going through because clinicians never experience mental illness. Another significant benefit of this memoir is her example of how a mental illness, while it may affect one’s life, is not the end of someone’s career. Dr. Jamison, once she maintains her treatment plan, goes on to write the book (literally) on bipolar disorder and becomes very successful. Her clinical training is evident in this memoir, particularly when she discusses statistics related to bipolar disorder and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a treatment regimen. Additionally, this memoir provides a valuable portrayal of a successful female scientist ( Hoh, 2009 ; Schinske et al., 2016 ).

Jamison also proves that a diagnosis does not have to define a person, which provides a valuable counter-point to the more difficult course of illness experienced by Steele in The Day the Voices Stopped . Similarly, Dr. Jamison’s work helps break some of the stigma that surrounds discussions of mental health and illness. For example, at one point, Jamison was considering having children and her physician advised her against it, frankly telling her that the genetics of bipolar and the likelihood that she wouldn’t be able to care for her children would make having kids a poor decision. Our students appreciate this representation of improper medical care as an opportunity to discuss how properly-treated patients with mental illness can lead productive family lives and successfully raise children.

Dr. Jamison does not censor herself in her memoir. In the prologue, she says she is tired of hiding who she is, and makes it clear she will be honest in this book. She describes, in incredible detail, her thoughts and actions during both manic and depressive episodes, including a suicide attempt. Because of this, sensitive readers may find it difficult to read certain parts of this book. Her tone throughout the memoir, though, is not as bitter and angry as Wortmann’s, nor is it as optimistic as Steele’s. The memoir is clearly being written retrospectively, which brings a level-headed and self-critical tone to it as the older Jamison looks back on her actions.

There are small sections that are written as vivid flashbacks, putting the reader in whatever moment Dr. Jamison depicts. The writing style of the book can be poetic, which some students have told us makes it too abstract and difficult to read, although others find the beautiful prose to be enjoyable. Some parts of this particularly emotional memoir, such as when Dr. Jamison’s lover is killed while on duty in the Navy, are incredibly sad. While she is eloquent and well-spoken, reading this memoir can be mentally and emotionally exhausting.

As with the memoirs by Wortmann and Steele (discussed above), the potential for this memoir to cause distress for students is high, particularly if they or someone close to them have experienced severe depression, suicidal tendencies and/or bipolar disorder. Again, students should be aware of this before reading it, and provided with local hotlines if they find themselves in crisis (see the last 2 pages of Supplementary Material 1 and “Important Caveats” above). While the memoir may serve as a hopeful piece to some, it should be kept in mind that Dr. Jamison was able to seek treatment because she had a personal support network and the support resources of an excellent university/workplace. While her success in the face of her illness should not be belittled, there are many people in a similar situation who do not have access to such resources.

One other clinically relevant consideration that this book raises is patient non-compliance with treatment. We recommend that instructors discuss the reasons for this while being mindful that students may themselves be current or future patients and many may also be future physicians. We recommend emphasis be put on frank discussions between physicians and patients about side-effects, doses and treatment options. Understanding these factors are an important learning objective in our course and relevant resources are made available to students (e.g., Jin et al., 2008 ).

Front of the Class: How Tourette Syndrome Made Me the Teacher I Never Had

Brad Cohen and Lisa Wysocky (2005) Disease or Disorder: Tourette Syndrome Genre: Memoir

As a child, Brad Cohen had uncontrollable tics, several of which involved involuntarily making sounds others would consider disruptive. In his adolescence, he was diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, a neurological disorder that was virtually unknown outside the medical community in the 1980’s. Cohen tells the story of his youth and young adulthood, describing the difficulties and barriers he encountered because of his tics. While some did not believe his diagnosis, others did. Cohen’s mother began to gather as much information as she could. She and Cohen quickly became advocates for those with Tourette Syndrome, initially by educating their own community.

Cohen began to advocate on a national scale from childhood, going so far as to participate in the Sally Jesse Raphael Show, though he was not permitted to remain on stage the entire time with the other Tourette Syndrome patients because his symptoms were more severe. There is a particularly moving passage in which Cohen speaks to his entire elementary school about his disorder, with overall positive reception by his teachers and fellow students.

Cohen attended college knowing he wanted to be the compassionate, understanding teacher he never had. Once he finished school and had his teaching certificate, he began to interview for jobs. During interviews, Cohen was honest about his disorder. Though no one could or would say it outright (the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits job discrimination based on disabilities), Cohen presents a convincing case that his struggles finding a job were because of his disease. After twenty-four schools turned him down, Brad Cohen finally got a position just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, teaching second and third grade. He received several awards for new teachers, which eventually set him on a course to become assistant principal of his elementary school.

This is a particularly heart-warming and memorable book. Brad Cohen’s optimism and how he uses his disorder to educate others is encouraging. Cohen works with the Tourette Syndrome Association, through both national and local chapters, and he started his own foundation and summer camp for children with this syndrome. Unlike some other disorders, the symptoms of Tourette Syndrome cannot be easily hidden; that put Cohen in a unique position to use his symptoms as an opportunity for discussion. For example, one point in the memoir where discussion can naturally start is the recollection of Brad’s school presentation, where his disorder is explained to the entire school during an assembly. This moment serves as a gateway to discussing public opinions, judgments and treatment of adults and children with Tourette Syndrome.

This book is the least likely of any we recommend to be triggering for students; the most emotionally trying part is a story of a young student of Cohen’s who dies of cancer. This book is appropriate for all readers because of Cohen’s positive tone. In fact, his perseverance and determination to live as normal a life as possible is encouraging for any young reader who may be facing similar circumstances. There is also an underlying message throughout the memoir about accepting others for who they are and not bullying them for conditions they cannot control. Because this memoir is optimistic and upbeat, the weight of Brad’s condition on his life is not felt by readers the same way as in other memoirs. This reflects Cohen’s uniquely optimistic personality: he approaches the most negative aspects of Tourette Syndrome with resolve to succeed. While he does address bullying, he does not dwell upon the negative aspects of this syndrome.

Still Alice

Lisa Genova (2007) Disease or Disorder: Alzheimer’s Disease Genre: Fiction

Author Lisa Genova creates a story so rich readers would be forgiven for forgetting its fictional nature. Still Alice is a fictional account of a woman and her family dealing with the lifestyle changes that early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease brings. The main character, Alice Howland, is a cognitive psychologist and linguistics expert working at Harvard University when the novel begins. She teaches, runs a lab and travels to conferences like many academic researchers. In the first half of the novel, Alice displays subtle, early symptoms associated with dementia, including memory loss and disorientation; later, she is diagnosed with a rare, single-gene form of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

Genova’s novel follows how Alice’s disease affects her career and family life, with her three adult children and husband coming into conflict and confronting the difficulties of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s Disease. Alice must face a rapidly deteriorating mental state, and creates a suicide plan so that she will not burden her family once her memory is gone and she can no longer live on her own. The book is structured so that each section represents a month, which allows the reader to follow the time course of Alice’s illness. Genova’s use of the first-person perspective humanizes Alzheimer’s, pulling readers into an emotionally charged and deeply personal account that often reads as though it is nonfiction.

One of the advantages to this well written novel is that it makes the subject of Alzheimer’s Disease more accessible to readers who may not be inclined to pick up a memoir or other piece of nonfiction. The information that Genova includes about Alzheimer’s is reasonably accurate considering its non-technical nature. An important plot point, the genetic basis for the disease, is written so that it can be used to start a discussion about genetics and the role that it plays in early-onset Alzheimer’s. This includes a comparison of rare, Mendelian alleles that can essentially guarantee a disease, with more common risk-factor alleles that only increase chances of a disease.

It is clear that Genova thoroughly researched the disease in order to create her characters and their stories, but this novel lacks the personal reflection that a memoir would bring. Genova also invents an experimental drug for clearing amyloid plaques that does not exist. However, this can be a launching point for discussing real experimental treatments, such as tau and amyloid immunotherapy ( Lannfelt et al., 2014 ; Pedersen & Sigurdsson, 2015 ).

Although Alice plans to take her life when her symptoms become severe, the discussions of suicide and self-harm are less graphic than those in Triggered , The Day the Voices Stopped , or An Unquiet Mind . Although many of our students have had family members with Alzheimer’s, none have found the book distressing so far, and those who have spoken to us about their family experiences seem to find the book cathartic. However, instructors should still be mindful that this may not hold true for all potential readers.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Mark Haddon (2003) Disease or disorder: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Genre: Fiction

In this fictional account, Mark Haddon introduces a possible view of the world through the eyes of an autistic boy, Christopher Boone, as he strives to solve the mystery of who murdered his neighbor’s dog and why. Christopher is a British teenager and mathematical savant who idealizes Sherlock Holmes and is strongly committed to finding and expressing the unvarnished truth. As Christopher follows clues and interviews suspects, he also navigates social interactions with strangers, adapts to new environments, and begins planning for his future. The novel is written as Christopher’s journal covering his daily experiences with his family and school.

All events are described in first-person through Christopher’s point of view, laying out his thought process as he tries to decipher the behavior of his peers and neighbors. Christopher’s literal interpretation of the world creates a poignant perspective of Christopher’s inner life for the reader.

Christopher refers to advice from his social worker, Siobhan, though out the story, giving us a glimpse of the therapy and social training autistic children might receive. He often becomes hyper-focused on a particular detail and can become intensely upset when confused or stressed. The novel also touches upon the difficulties inherent in raising a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and how that stress can affect a family. Haddon succeeds in providing an engaging and entertaining snapshot of what it may be like to have ASD, even though the author himself does not have this disorder. Although Haddon has done research into ASD, he intentionally does not explicitly use “autism” or related words in the book, emphasizing it as a work of fiction ( Powell’s Books, 2006 ).

As a novel written in the voice of a 15-year-old, this book is easy to read and comprehend. It is not intimidating or dense, which can be an advantage over nonfiction accounts or memoirs. Christopher is an endearing protagonist and certainly humanizes the experience of ASD. Additionally, his interactions with strangers and police officers demonstrate the lack of awareness and understanding of ASD among the general public. Though the novel is by no means technical, it does introduce some psychotherapy treatments and strategies used with autistic kids. It also shows some behaviors commonly observed in those with ASD. Christopher does not address the underlying cause or prevalence of ASD, nor any biological consequences of the disorder. As a novel by an author who does not have this condition, the book is an incomplete picture of the possible experiences of an autistic teenager. However, the topics and issues in the novel are presented in an engaging way.

ASD is a character trait of the protagonist, but the book is not written with the goal of educating about the disorder. It influences Christopher’s choices and point of view, but he does not directly discuss the impact of ASD on his life in much detail, nor is the biology discussed. As such, the book provides more of a motivator for students to learn about ASD and to give a human (albeit fictional) face to the disease. We chose this book, in part, because it is stylistically very different from the others we review here. It therefore provides our classes with a break from the more scientifically rigorous or challenging books. Instructors who want a book on ASD that is more similar to the others we review here could consider Temple Grandin’s autobiography ( Grandin, 1995 ) or Grandin’s biography ( Montgomery, 2012 ) instead.

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Andrew Solomon (2001) Disease or disorder: Major Depressive Disorder Genre: Memoir and Compilation of Short Cases

Andrew Solomon interprets the biology, pharmacology, psychology and human experience of depression through a literary lens in his memoir, The Noonday Demon . As a professional writer with depression and anxiety, Solomon is particularly adept at creating analogies to further readers’ understanding, striving to put depression into a framework that adults who have not experienced depression can understand. At a whopping 688 pages, The Noonday Demon can be intimidating, but it is an impressively thorough exploration of depression effectively organized into 13 chapters.

The author begins by offering his own experience with breakdowns and treatment, along with experiences conveyed to him by friends, family and interviewees. The personal stories anchor each chapter in honest biographical portraits that readers will find relatable and emotionally engaging. As the son of a drug company executive, Solomon provides insight into the development of pharmacological treatment of depression, bluntly addressing the advantages and disadvantages of various types of drugs. The book is full of interviews with clinicians, researchers, pharmacologists, experts and other sufferers of depression, which are chronicled in an extensive bibliography. With the skill of a humanities scholar, Solomon captures and explains much about the experience, origins and factors of depression.

As a teaching tool, The Noonday Demon provides personal stories which capture and convey the experience and consequences of depression better than a list of diagnostic criteria. Our students have expressed both relief and excitement at reading an eloquent articulation of experiences similar to their own, reminding them that they are understood and not alone when struggling with depression. Others said that the book helped them empathize more with depressed friends and loved ones. However, some portions of the book read like a dense dissertation or rambling personal journal entries, making it difficult for some students to extract the pertinent information and descriptions. Despite that, the author’s literary style gives the writing a poetic and lyrical quality, earning acclaim and accolades including the National Book Award and consideration for the Pulitzer Prize. The book provides a wonderful balance between research findings, societal impacts and human interest, which is particularly helpful in a classroom of students with varying academic backgrounds.

As an in-depth work of nonfiction which resists categorization, The Noonday Demon covers a wide range of topics relevant to depression and offers many starting points for classroom discussion. Solomon addresses the role of cultural values, history, politics and identity in the manifestation of mental illness. These topics are not often addressed in scientific works, but certainly influence the manifestation of depression. He also does not shy away from emotionally heavy material, including depression in the wake of traumatic experiences (e.g., massacres, sexual assault), comorbidity with drug addiction and suicidal ideation. Because the book was published in 2001, some of the research referenced is a bit dated. In the 2015 edition, Solomon added a chapter entitled, “Since”, to update readers on relevant research findings and discuss the public’s reactions to the book.

Rather than requiring the whole book, we employed it in our classrooms as a selection of chapters, including “Depression”, “Breakdowns”, “Treatments” and “Populations”. “Depression” is the first chapter of the book, introducing the author’s background with depression and anxiety and multiple descriptions of the experience of depression. This chapter was chosen to give a broad overview of the disorder, and provide the language and analogies for future class discussion. “Breakdowns” illustrates symptoms and triggers of mental health crises, and gives an account of what helped the author recover from breakdowns. It shows steps a patient might take during or in anticipation of a breakdown, as well as ways to interact and support someone struggling with depression. “Treatments” highlights various ways depression is treated, the proposed mechanism behind the treatment and evidence of its relative effectiveness. This chapter is more biologically oriented and facilitates discussion of the cellular and chemical basis of depression. Finally, “Populations” is included to acknowledge that depression has sociological and cultural underpinnings while describing how these factors influence the patients’ experience, diagnostic criteria and treatment options. One motivation behind including this chapter is to engage students from a diverse socioeconomic and cultural background who typically might not see their values or experiences reflected in the story of a white American male struggling with depression. This selection of chapters makes the length and density of the book more manageable for the students and allows the instructor to choose the relevant points for their course. The book does not have an overarching storyline, so it is feasible to look at chapters in isolation.

There is a chapter entitled “Suicide” (which we do not usually assign), and issues related to suicide and other serious aspects of depression are discussed at many places in the book (including in many of the chapters we do assign). As such, we recommend instructors bring the same considerations discussed above in Triggered , The Day the Voices Stopped and An Unquiet Mind to bear in discussing this book.

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Susannah Cahalan (2013) Disease or Disorder: Anti-NMDA-Receptor Autoimmune Encephalitis Genre: Memoir

In Brain on Fire , Susannah Cahalan describes her abrupt, rapid, and frightening descent into madness. At the time, she was a 24-year-old reporter for the New York Post . She was outgoing, confident, sharp and witty. After a few months on the job, signs began to appear that showed something was abnormal. First, after getting two bug bites, she became paranoid that her apartment had a bedbug infestation. Around that time, she also forgot about a crucial meeting with her boss, began deleting many of her old articles, and impulsively decided to go through her boyfriend’s emails, all of which was uncharacteristic of her. She was experiencing persistent nausea, migraine and a “pins and needles” feeling that was spreading throughout the left side of her body. When she saw a neurologist, he determined that her MRI was normal and that it was likely a virus. With her increased moodiness, her friend’s mother thought it was bipolar disorder.

After having a tonic-clonic seizure, the neurologist surmised that her symptoms may have had to do with her alcohol consumption (which he overestimated because he did not take her word about how much she drank). She began to experience more seizures, and increasingly, delusions and hallucinations that often came in the form of voices, as well as severe paranoia, including thinking that the hospital staff and the TV reporters were all talking about her. Cahalan started slurring her words and sometimes spoke in fragments of sentences or in unintelligible noises. Several doctors tried to piece together her symptoms of psychosis with her elevated blood pressure, heart rate, and white blood cell count. She became extremely thin and experienced concentration and memory difficulties.

After ruling out many infectious and autoimmune diseases and considering her normal CT and MRI scans, it was finally determined that she had an exceptionally rare disease known as anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis, that had only been discovered about two years prior by Cahalan’s eventual physician, Dr. Dalmau, and his colleagues ( Wandinger et al., 2011 ). After treatment with steroids, plasmapheresis, and IVIG to rid the body of the anti-NMDA receptor antibodies that were attacking her brain, she made a full recovery and eventually returned to her work as a journalist. Her family, boyfriend, hospital care team, and friends helped her to put together the pieces of her “month of madness,” and she went on to write an article about it in the New York Post, titled, “My mysterious lost month of madness.”

There are several benefits to using this book as a means for sparking a discussion about neuropsychiatric disorders. As Cahalan is misdiagnosed with many different diseases, this book can serve as a review of symptoms from different diseases discussed during a semester-long course on Neurobiology of Disease. It discusses parallels to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, as well as the ways in which they differ from what the author experienced. Therefore, the reader does not just get an insight into anti-NMDA-receptor encephalitis but is also introduced to other disorders. In particular, the psychotic symptoms that Cahalan experiences can be used as a jumping-off point to discuss the NMDA/glutamate hypothesis of schizophrenia ( Laruelle, 2014 ; Chang et al., 2014 ). Second, this memoir gives a deeply personal, moving account of one person’s experience with this disease. Additionally, for students who are aspiring physicians, this book can bring up questions about listening to patients, and how to evaluate whether they are being honest.

The author clearly discusses the science behind her diagnosis. She explains what the disease is, how it gave rise to her symptoms, and how her treatment was able to cure her. She also provides interesting and helpful information on the disease’s prevalence and prognosis. Furthermore, the age of the author at the time that her disease manifested is similar to that of undergraduates, which may allow them to connect and empathize with her experience even more. Finally, the author’s story illuminates a common theme in diagnosing neuropsychiatric disorders: that they are often hard to diagnose, especially when people experience symptoms that appear in more than one disorder’s diagnostic criteria. Many times, it can also be difficult to identify the root cause of one’s psychiatric symptoms.

While one valuable aspect of this book is that it shows how symptoms of psychiatric disorders can be caused by other underlying diseases. The flip side of this is that Brain on Fire describes the experience of someone who has a very rare disease. Therefore, some instructors may choose to use it as a teaching tool in a unit on rare diseases, but some may choose to omit it, preferring to expose students to the experiences of those with more common neuropsychiatric disorders. Additionally, the author’s account of her symptoms becomes repetitive. While this was necessary to accurately convey as many details about her experience as possible, it may be easier and more time-effective for instructors to present her particular story in the form of a video (Susannah Cahalan has several interviews and talks online in which she talks about this experience ( Cahalan 2012 ; Cahalan 2013b ; Cahalan 2017 ) or as a case study to the class.

No major considerations arose that an instructor would need to address when assigning this book as a recommended or required reading in an undergraduate-level class. There is one scene describing a delusion the author has in which she believes her father has killed his wife and is potentially plotting to kill her. From a subjective standpoint, this would be the only potentially jarring scene of the book. There are no other parts that seem likely to be clinically counter-indicated for any students.

CONCLUSIONS

Although there are many considerations to bear in mind when using biographies, autobiographies and realistic fictional accounts of patient experiences with diseases in teaching about the neurobiology of disease or related subjects, these books can be valuable tools to help instructors spark and maintain student interest in material. In addition, they can be starting points for broader discussions about the impact of science on health care, as well as considerations that patients and physicians should be aware of in their lives and careers.

Supplementary Information

This work was not financially supported by any entity. The authors thank the following consultants: Drs. Hilary Schuldt, Heather Dwyer, and Chad Hershock (Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation; Dr. Schuldt’s current affiliation is Center for Advancing Teaching & Learning Through Research, Northeastern University), Dr. Kasey Creswell (CMU Psychology Department), Dr. Kurt Kumler (Director of Counseling and Psychological Services at Carnegie Mellon University), and Dr. Justin Schreiber (Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC), with a reminder to readers that the recommendations for discussing mental health issues with students represent our own perspectives and not that of our home institutions, any subsidiary organization within those institutions, or any individual or institution who we thank here.

• Alter A. John Green tells a story of emotional pain and crippling anxiety. His own. NY Times. 2017. Oct 10, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/books/john-green-anxiety-obsessive-compulsive-disorder.html .
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The Ten Best Books About Depression

What to read if you want to understand depression..

Posted February 28, 2014 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

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Want to understand depression ? Here are the ten books I recommend most strongly:

• Manufacturing Depression: The secret history of a modern disease. Greenberg, G. (2010). An excellent book on how the diagnosis of depression has evolved. It’s a sharp, and often funny, critique of the biomedical approach to depression.
• The Happiness Trap: How to stop struggling and start living. Harris, R. (2008). A great self-help book, which presents the perspective of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy . I am generally skeptical about self-help books, so I don’t recommend it lightly!
• The Antidepressant Era. Healy, D. (1999). A fascinating and authoritative history. If you want to understand how antidepressants were discovered and marketed and the scientific and economic forces that entrenched antidepressants as the mainline treatment for depression, read this book.
• The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder. Horwitz, A. V. & Wakefield, J. C. (2007). This presents the thesis that the epidemic of depression is not real but rather results from a broadened diagnosis of depression. I recommend it as a stimulating read even though I disagree with the thesis.
• An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness. Jamison, K. R. (1995). This is still the best memoir about bipolar disorder , written by a leading bipolar disorder researcher.
• Speaking of Sadness: Depression, disconnection, and the meanings of illness. Karp, D. A. (1997). A brilliant sociological account of what it means to be a depressed person in the modern world, told through interviews with 50 patients.
• The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the antidepressant myth. Kirsch, I. (2011). Presents compelling analyses showing that antidepressants only have modest efficacy. If you want to understand the science of clinical trials, read this book.
• Rethinking Depression: How to shed mental health labels and create personal meaning. Maisel, E. (2012). Bold presentation of an existentialist perspective on depression. You will never think about depression the same way after reading it.
• The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression. Solomon, A. (2002). A beautifully written compendium that integrates personal, cultural, and scientific perspectives on depression.
• Darkness Visible. Styron, W. (1992). Still the best memoir about depression. It contains searching and haunting descriptions of the descent into depression by literary master William Styron.

Does my book The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic belong on this list? Time will tell. I am certainly biased, so please check out the opinions of PT Bloggers Kashdan , Pruchno , and Bergland . Ultimately, people like you will decide.

Happy reading!

Jonathan Rottenberg is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida, where he directs the Mood and Emotion Laboratory.

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The Best New Biographies and Memoirs to Read in 2024

This year sees some riveting and remarkable lives—from artist ai weiwei to singer-songwriter joni mitchell—captured on the page..

A life story can be read for escapist pleasure. But at other times, reading a memoir or biography can be an expansive exercise, opening us up to broader truths about our world. Often, it’s an edifying experience that reminds us of our universal human vulnerability and the common quest for purpose in life.

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Biographies and memoirs charting remarkable lives—whether because of fame, fortune or simply fascination—have the power to inspire us for their depth, curiosity or challenges. This year sees a bumper calendar of personal histories enter bookshops, grappling with enigmatic public figures like singer Joni Mitchell and writer Ian Fleming , to nuanced analysis of how motherhood or sociopathy shape our lives—for better and for worse.

Here we compile some of the most rewarding biographies and memoirs out in 2024. There are stories of trauma and recovery, art as politics and politics as art, and sentences as single life lessons spread across books that will make you rethink much about personal life stories. After all, understanding the triumphs and trials of others can help us see how we can change our own lives to create something different or even better.

Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir by Ai Weiwei and illustrated by Gianluca Costantini

Ai Weiwei , the iconoclastic artist and fierce critic of his homeland China, mixes fairy tales with moral lessons to evocatively retrace the story of his life in graphic form. Illustrations are by Italian artist Gianluca Costantini . “Any artist who isn’t an activist is a dead artist,” Weiwei writes in Zodiac , as he embraces everything from animals found in the Chinese zodiac to mystical folklore tales with anamorphic animals to argue the necessity of art as politics incarnate. The meditative exercise uses pithy anecdotes alongside striking visuals to sketch out a remarkable life story marked by struggle. It’s one weaving political manifesto, philosophy and personal memoir to engage readers on the necessity of art and agitation against authority in a world where we sometimes must resist and fight back.

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

Already well-known for her experimental writings, Sheila Heti takes a decade of diary entries and maps sentences against the alphabet, from A to Z. The project is a subversive rethink of our relationship to introspection—which often asks for order and clarity, like in diary writing—that maps new patterns and themes in its disjointed form. Heti plays with both her confessionals and her sometimes formulaic writing style (like knowingly using “Of course” in entries) to retrace the changes made (and unmade) across ten years of her life. Alphabetical Diaries is a sometimes demanding book given the incoherence of its entries, but remains an illuminating project in thinking about efforts at self-documentation.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison

Unlike her previous work The Empathy Exams , which examined how we relate to one another and on human suffering, writer Leslie Jamison wrestles today with her own failed marriage and the grief of surviving single parenting. After the birth of her daughter, Jamison divorces her partner “C,” traverses the trials and tribulations of rebound relationships (including with “an ex-philosopher”) and confronts unresolved emotional pains born of her own life living under the divorce of her parents. In her intimate retelling—paired with her superb prose—Jamison charts a personal history that acknowledges the unending divide mothers (and others) face dividing themselves between partners, children and their own lives.

Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch

Whether dancing figures or a “radiant baby,” the recognizable cartoonish symbols in Keith Haring ’s art endure today as shorthand signs representing both his playfulness and politicking. Haring (1958-1990) is the subject of writer Brad Gooch ’s deft biography, Radiant , a book that mines new material from the archive along with interviews with contemporaries to reappraise the influential quasi-celebrity artist. From rough beginnings tagging graffiti on New York City walls to cavorting with Andy Warhol and Madonna on art pieces, Haring battled everything from claims of selling out to over-simplicity. But he persisted with work that leveraged catchy quotes and colorful imagery to advance unsavory political messages—from AIDS to crack cocaine. A life tragically cut short at 31 is one powerfully celebrated in this new noble portrait.

The House of Hidden Meanings by RuPaul Charles

In The House of Hidden Meaning , celebrated drag queen, RuPaul , reckons with a murky inner world that has shaped—and hindered—a lifetime of gender-bending theatricality. The figurative house at the center of the story is his “ego,” a plaguing barrier that apparently long inhibited the performer from realizing dreams of greatness. Now as the world’s most recognizable drag queen—having popularized the art form for mainstream audiences with the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race —RuPaul reflects on the power that drag and self-love have long offered across his difficult, and sometimes tortured, life. Readers expecting dishy stories may be disappointed, but the psychological self-assessment in the pages of this memoir is far more edifying than Hollywood gossip could ever be.

Sociopath: A Memoir by Patric Gagne

Patric Gagne is an unlikely subject for a memoir on sociopaths. Especially since she is a former therapist with a doctorate in clinical psychology. Still, Gagne makes the case that after a troubled childhood of antisocial behavior (like stealing trinkets and cursing teachers) and a difficult adulthood (now stealing credit cards and fighting authority figures), she receives a diagnosis of sociopathy. Her memoir recounts many episodes of bad behavior—deeds often marked by a lack of empathy, guilt or even common decency—where her great antipathy mars any ability for her to connect with others. Sociopath is a rewarding personal exposé that demystifies one vilified psychological condition so often seen as entirely untreatable or irreparable. Only now there’s a familiar face and a real story linked to the prognosis.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare

Nicholas Shakespeare is an acclaimed novelist and an astute biographer, delivering tales that wield a discerning eye to subjects and embrace a robust attention to detail. Ian Fleming (1908-1964), the legendary creator of James Bond, is the latest to receive Shakespeare’s treatment. With access to new family materials from the Fleming estate, the seemingly contradictory Fleming is seen anew as a totally “different person” from his popular image. Taking cues from Fleming’s life story—from a refined upbringing spent in expensive private schools to working for Reuters as a journalist in the Soviet Union—Shakespeare reveals how these experiences shaped the elusive world of espionage and intrigue created in Fleming’s novels. Other insights include how Bond was likely informed by Fleming’s cavalier father, a major who fought in WWI. A martini (shaken, not stirred) is best enjoyed with this bio.

Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie , while giving a rare public lecture in New York in August 2022, was violently stabbed by an assailant brandishing a knife . The attack saw Rushdie lose his left hand and his sight in one eye. Speaking to The New Yorker a year later , he confirmed a memoir was in the works that would confront this harrowing existential experience: “When somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.” Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder is promised to be his raw, revelatory and deeply psychological confrontation with the violent incident. Like the sword of Damocles, brutality has long stalked Rushdie ever since the 1989 fatwa issued against the author, following the publication of his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses . The answer to such barbarity, Rushdie is poised to argue, is by finding the strength to stand up again.

The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019–2022 by Peter Schjeldahl (Release: May 14)

Peter Schjeldahl (1942-2022), longstanding art critic of The New Yorker , confronted his mortality when he was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer in 2019. The resulting essay collection he then penned, The Art of Dying , is a masterful meditation on one life preoccupied entirely with aesthetics and criticism. It’s a discursive tactic for a memoir that avoids discussing Schjeldahl’s coming demise while equally confirming its impending visit by avoiding it. Acknowledging that he finds himself “thinking about death less than I used to,” Schjeldahl spends most of the pages revisiting familiar art subjects—from Edward Hopper ’s output to Peter Saul ’s Pop Art—as vehicles to re-examine his own remarkable life. With a life that began in the humble Midwest, Schjeldahl says his birthplace was one that ultimately availed him to write so plainly and cogently on art throughout his career. Such posthumous musings prove illuminating lessons on the potency of American art, with whispered asides on the tragedy of death that will come for all of us.

Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers (Release: June 11)

Joni Mitchell has enjoyed a remarkable revival recently, even already being one of the most acclaimed and enduring singer/songwriters. After retiring from public appearances for health reasons in the 2010s, Mitchell, 80, has returned to the spotlight with a 2021 Kennedy Centers honor , an appearance accepting the 2023 Gershwin Prize and even a live performance at this year’s Grammy Awards . It’s against this backdrop of public celebration of Mitchell that NPR music critic Ann Powers retraces the life story and musical (re)evolution of the singer, from folk to jazz genres and rock to soul music, across five decades for the American songbook. “What you are about to read is not a standard account of the life and work of Joni Mitchell,” she writes in the introduction. Instead, Powers’ project is one showing how Mitchell’s many journeys—from literal road trips inspiring tracks like “All I Want” to inner probings of Mitchell’s psyche, such as the song “Both Sides Now”—have always inspired Mitchell’s enduring, emotive and palpable output. These travels hold the key, Powers says, to understanding an enigmatic artist.

• SEE ALSO : ‘Under the Bridge’ Review: A Miniseries That Interrogates the True Crime Genre

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These 12 Stunning Autobiographies Will Leave You in Wonder

By Mia Barzilay Freund

We may earn a commission if you buy something from any affiliate links on our site.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to win Wimbledon , run The Washington Post , or get drunk with Jimmy Buffett ? Through the best autobiographies and celebrity memoirs , we can access gripping true stories told in the words of the people who lived through them.

Translating experience into language is a creative act. Autobiography can be earnest or irreverent, playful or profound. Often, real life can be stranger than fiction. The best autobiographies bring us closer to remarkable people and circumstances—and they’re well-written, to boot.

But that’s not all. The best examples from the genre can provide insights that help us improve our own lives. After all, there’s nothing like a story of perseverance against all odds to prove anything is possible.

These tales of endurance, transformation, and unlikely triumph are sure to command your attention––and dare we say, inspire your own main character energy .

Open by Andre Agassi

You don’t need to love tennis to find yourself totally engrossed by the story of Agassi’s legendary career. Once the number-one player in the world, Agassi led a life of pressure and publicity—from his intense childhood coached by his father to his high-profile marriages to Brooke Shields and Steffi Graf to the acute physical pain of his last chapter in professional tennis. The book was written with the help of ghostwriter J. R. Moehringer, whose own memoir The Tender Bar inspired a 2021 film with Ben Affleck. (Moehringer most recently helped Prince Harry pen his memoir, Spare .)

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

The Glass Castle

A New York Times bestseller for more than eight years, this stunning memoir details the author’s unconventional upbringing and her trajectory from a trailer park in Arizona to the New York City literary scene. Under her troubled but relentlessly dreaming father, Wells nurtured her imagination as she and her siblings learned to fend for themselves within their dysfunctional household. Her approach was creative and sometimes painful—like when she suffered full-body burns cooking hot dogs at age three, or when she fashioned homemade braces from rubber bands and wire. A brilliant prequel, Half Broke Horses , focuses on Walls’s adventurous grandmother during the early 1900s.

The Accidental Life by Terry McDonell

The Accidental Life

A legend in the world of magazines and publishing, McDonell was the trusted editor and friend of literary greats like James Salter and George Plimpton. His 2016 memoir chronicles relationships and skirmishes across a four-decade career in journalism—from sipping wine with Jimmy Buffett to playing “acid golf” with Hunter S. Thompson. Each chapter comes marked with a word count, making for satisfying, self-contained dips into literary lore. Evocative, irreverent, and honest, McDonell’s memoir spans a wild and wonderful time in American media.

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

How to Say Babylon

A poet as well as a memoirist, Sinclair fills her 2023 memoir with lyrical descriptions of her upbringing in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where the Rastafarian faith into which she was born prescribed rigid codes on the basis of gender. However, language—specifically, poetry —served as a welcome escape, made possible by Sinclair’s literature-loving mother. Moving and unflinching, Babylon is an astonishing feat of memory set in motion.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

I Know Why the Caged Bird

Angelou enlarged and enriched the genre of autobiography with her 1969 account of her early life in Stamps, Arkansas. In it, she fashions her younger self into a literary character through whom she revisits events of the past. A young Maya endures affronts to her humanity through encounters with racism and sexual violence, but her story channels adolescent insecurity into self-possession, reflected in the author’s breathtaking command of language and narrative.

Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones

Easy Beauty

Born with sacral agenesis, a rare condition that affects her gait and stature, Cooper Jones is keenly aware of the reactions her physicality elicits. Her subtle and humorous 2022 memoir—a Pulitzer Prize finalist—challenges the reader to reassess the way bodies claim space , tracing how Cooper Jones’s own perspective shifts when she unexpectedly becomes a mother.

Personal History: A Memoir by Katharine Graham

Personal History

Graham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography explores her isolating upbringing amid extreme privilege, her exhilarating and agonizing marriage, and her leadership of The Washington Post during its coverage of events like the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal. With its intimate insight into a formidable figure in American life, Graham’s Personal History makes the memoir a literary force.

Grace: A Memoir by Grace Coddington

Vogue ’s longtime creative director pulls back the curtain on the fashion industry and the creative world surrounding it, documenting the insecurities of moving from industry outsider to insider and the joy of bringing to life fashion fantasies in the magazine’s pages. Beginning with her upbringing in Wales and her early career in modeling, Coddington recounts things in a playful and characteristically British tone: the professional squabbles, artistic decisions, iconic outfits, and all. The memoir also features Coddington’s personal photographs, as well as lush spreads from her favorite features.

Por Estas Calles Bravas / Down These Mean Streets by Piri Tomás

Down These Mean Streets

Growing up in Spanish Harlem in the 1930s and ’40s, Tomás experienced discrimination and abuse on the basis of his Puerto Rican heritage. In an environment of poverty and violence, he fell into crime and drug addiction and eventually was incarcerated over a dispute with a police officer. His vivid personal account, available in both English and Spanish, details his journey from a place of hopelessness to self-acceptance through storytelling.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Douglass’s narrative is an important document of American history, as well as an essential piece of American literature. It records his experiences under slavery and his eventual escape and involvement in the abolition movement. A story of incredible hardship and triumph, the narrative includes the acquisition of language itself; Douglass taught himself to read and write, skills the enslaved were otherwise denied.

The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day

The Long Loneliness

A leader in the Catholic Worker movement, Day was a radical political organizer and journalist governed by principles of nonviolence and charity. Her autobiography captures a storied life, including her religious conversion, her personal conflicts over motherhood, and her founding and operation of the Catholic Worker newspaper. Her autobiography stands as an exquisite piece of personal reflection and social activism (with a moving introduction by psychiatrist Robert Coles).

Night by Elie Wiesel

Written in 1960, Wiesel’s memoir is the sobering account of his experiences during the Holocaust, including his time in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. At certain moments, his prose takes on a fractured, faltering quality, as if language itself fails to capture the horrors he endured. Sixty-four years after its publication, Night remains an important record of a dark chapter in recent history.

By Alexandra Macon

By Kiana Murden

By Christian Allaire

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Book Reviews

This collection may be the closest we'll ever come to a dickinson autobiography.

Maureen Corrigan

A new collection of Emily Dickinson's letters has been published by Harvard's Belknap Press, edited by Dickinson scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell. Three Lions/Getty Images hide caption

A new collection of Emily Dickinson's letters has been published by Harvard's Belknap Press, edited by Dickinson scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell.

Among the Great Moments in Literary History I wish I could've witnessed is that day, sometime after May 15, 1886, when Lavinia Dickinson entered the bedroom of her newly deceased older sister and began opening drawers.

Out sprang poems, almost 1,800 of them. Given that Emily Dickinson had only published a handful of poems during her lifetime, this discovery was a shock.

" 'Hope' is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul," begins one of those now-famous poems. Whatever Dickinson hoped for her poems, she could never have envisioned how they'd resonate with readers; nor how curious those readers would be about her life, much of it spent within her father's house in Amherst, Mass., and, in later years, within that bedroom.

Every so often, the reading public's image of Emily Dickinson shifts: For much of the 20th century, she was a fey Stevie Nicks-type figure — check out, for instance, the 1976 film of Julie Harris' lauded one-woman show, The Belle of Amherst .

A feminist Emily Dickinson emerged during the Second Women's Movement, when poems like "I'm 'wife' " were celebrated for their avant garde anger. And, jumping to the present, a new monumental volume of Dickinson's letters — the first in more than 60 years — gives us an engaged Emily Dickinson; a woman in conversation with the world, through gossip, as well as remarks about books, politics and the signal events of her age, particularly the Civil War.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson, by Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell Harvard's Belknap Press hide caption

The Letters of Emily Dickinson, by Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell

This new collection of The Letters of Emily Dickinson is published by Harvard's Belknap Press and edited by two Dickinson scholars, Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell. To accurately date some of Dickinson's letters, they've studied weather reports and seasonal blooming and harvest cycles in 19th century Amherst. They've also added some 300 previously uncollected letters to this volume for a grand total of 1,304 letters.

The result is that The Letters of Emily Dickinson reads like the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an intimate autobiography of the poet. The first letter here is written by an 11-year-old Dickinson to her brother Austin, away at school. It's a breathless, kid-sister-marvel of run-on sentences about yellow hens and a "skonk" and poor "Cousin Zebina [who] had a fit the other day and bit his tongue ..."

The final letter, by an ailing 55-year-old Dickinson — most likely the last she wrote before falling unconscious on May 13, 1886 — was to her cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross. It reads:

Never Mind The White Dress, Turns Out Emily Dickinson Had A Green Thumb

Little Cousins,  "Called back."  Emily. 

In between is a life filled with visitors, chores and recipes for doughnuts and coconut cakes. There's mention of the racist minstrel stereotype Jim Crow, as well as of public figures like Florence Nightingale and Walt Whitman. There are also allusions to the death toll of the ongoing Civil War.

Dickinson's loyal dog Carlo walks with her, and frogs and even flies keep her company. Indeed, in an 1859 letter about one such winged companion, Belle of Amherst charm alternates with cold-blooded callousness. Dickinson writes to her cousin Louisa:

Movie Interviews

Film celebrates emily dickinson's poetry and 'quiet passion'.

I enjoy much with a fly, during sister's absence, not one of your blue monsters, but a timid creature, that hops from pane to pane of her white house, so very cheerfully, and hums and thrums, a sort of speck piano. ...  I'll kill him the day [Lavinia] comes [home], for I shan't need him any more ..."  

Dickinson's singular voice comes into its own in the letters of the 1860s, which often blur into poems: cryptic, comic and charged with Awe. A simple thank-you note to her soul mate and beloved sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, reads:

Pop Culture Happy Hour

You don't know 'dickinson'.

Dear Sue,   The Supper was delicate and strange. I ate it with compunction as I would eat a Vision.

There are 1,304 letters, and, still, they're not enough. Scholars estimate that we only have about one-tenth of the letters Dickinson ever wrote. And, on that momentous day in 1886, Lavinia entered her sister's bedroom to find and successfully burn all the letters Dickinson herself had received from others during her lifetime. Such was the custom of the day. Which makes this new volume of Dickinson's letters feel like both an intrusion and an outwitting of the silence of death — something I want to believe Dickinson would have relished.

• Emily Dickinson

• International edition
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Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy audiobook review – a thrillingly blunt take on new motherhood

Narrator Simone Collins leans into the dark humour of life at the domestic coalface, where moments of fierce love jostle with soul-sapping drudgery

A thrillingly blunt account of new motherhood, Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize, and finds its narrator addressing her baby, whom she calls Sailor, as she reports from life at the domestic coalface. Blending the profound and the soul-sappingly mundane, she talks of her fierce love for her son while navigating the purgatory of laundry, mealtimes, baby groups, trips to the playground, broken nights and exhaustion. In between relaying the routine of her days, she reflects on her altered identity – “I was just a woman! How has this not registered before?” ­– and observes the inequity of life as the mother of an infant where the working world is “an adult place from which I’ve been banished” and during which she has become an “indoor creature indentured to domesticity”.

The narrator is the Irish actor Simone Collins, who leans into Kilroy’s dark humour and the protagonist’s compulsive frankness, which leads her to swear vociferously at her little boy – who by now is nearly two – after he wanders off in Ikea. But the villain of the piece is her lazy, tactless husband who, on getting home from work, heaps judgment on his wife for her chaotic, frazzled state and who believes changing the occasional nappy qualifies him as an “involved father”. When he suggests his wife has postnatal depression, she duly erupts: “This is life-is-shit depression … I miss my old life like I’d miss a lover. I pine for it. I daydream about leaving you so that I can be with it again. You’d like to diagnose postnatal depression because then it’s not your fault.”

Soldier Sailor is available from Faber, 6hr 15min

Further listening

Capote’s Women Laurence Leamer, Hodder & Stoughton, 10hr 25min A gossipy group biography of the New York socialites, known as “swans”, who were friends with Truman Capote, among them Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy, and political activist Pamela Harriman. Carrington MacDuffie reads.

The Kellerby Code Jonny Sweet, Bolinda Audio, 10hr 57min Actor Jack Davenport narrates this Saltburn-esque tale of murder and social climbing set in an English country house and revolving around a duplicitous outsider named Edward.

• Audiobook of the week

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Do You Know These Films Based on Great Biographies?

By J. D. Biersdorfer April 22, 2024

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Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about literature that has gone on to find new life in the form of movies, television shows, theatrical productions and other formats. This week’s quiz highlights films that were adapted from the biographies or autobiographies of their notable subjects.

Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their screen adaptations.

“Oppenheimer,” a film about the man who was instrumental in developing the first nuclear weapons for the United States, won seven Academy Awards earlier this year. The film’s screenplay was adapted from a 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. What was the main title of the book?

“American Prometheus”

“Burning the Sky”

“A Wing and a Prayer”

The 1972 film “Lady Sings the Blues” was loosely based on which singer’s 1956 autobiography?

Ella Fitzgerald

Bessie Smith

Billie Holiday

Mildred Bailey

“Alan Turing: The Enigma” is Andrew Hodges’ 1983 biography of the gay British mathematician who helped the Allies decipher encrypted Nazi messages during World War II, but was later punished for his sexuality. What was the name of the 2014 film based on the book?

“The Turing Test”

“The Code Breaker”

“The Imitation Game”

“Julie & Julia” is a 2009 film about the chef Julia Child and the blogger Julie Powell, who tried to make all the recipes from one of Child’s cookbooks years later. The screenplay was based on two different books, Powell’s 2005 memoir about the project (and source of the movie’s name) and Julia Child’s posthumously published 2006 autobiography. What was that book’s title?

“Blood, Bones and Butter”

“My Life in France”

“Kitchen Confidential”

“A Year in Provence”

After reading Louis Fischer’s 1950 biography of this global figure, the film director Richard Attenborough spent years trying to make a film about that person’s life. The picture was finally released in 1982 and won eight Academy Awards. Who was the subject of the movie?

Harriet Tubman

J. Edgar Hoover

Mahatma Gandhi

Frida Kahlo

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

• Biographies & Memoirs

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The Great Depression: A Diary: A Diary Paperback – Illustrated, August 31, 2010

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This collection of those entries reveals another side of the Great Depression—one lived through by ordinary, middle-class Americans, who on a daily basis grappled with a swiftly changing economy coupled with anxiety about the unknown future. Roth's depiction of life in time of widespread foreclosures, a schizophrenic stock market, political unrest and mass unemployment seem to speak directly to readers today.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publication date August 31, 2010
• Dimensions 5.95 x 0.9 x 8.95 inches
• ISBN-10 1586489011
• ISBN-13 978-1586489014
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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Publicaffairs; Reprint edition (August 31, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1586489011
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1586489014
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.95 x 0.9 x 8.95 inches
• #40 in Lawyer & Judge Biographies
• #474 in United States Biographies
• #2,095 in Memoirs (Books)

About the authors

Benjamin roth.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

James Ledbetter

I am very fortunate to be the editor of Inc. magazine and Inc.com, as well as to have worked at TIME, Reuters, The Village Voice, and many other publications, some of which still exist. When it comes to books I lean toward history, particularly history that foregrounds business and economic issues. My new book is a history of gold and American politics; the early reviews have been very flattering, and I hope you will agree with those assessments.

Daniel B. Roth

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‘Lucky’ is a delightful trip through the 20th century’s greatest hits

Jane smiley’s new novel is a quirky fictional autobiography of a moderately successful folk-rock singer-songwriter.

Open Jane Smiley’s new novel, “ Lucky ,” and thank God for the internet, because if you’re like me (well, poor you), you will want to look up and listen to song after song. The quirky fictional autobiography of a moderately successful singer-songwriter in the folk-rock mode of what the narrator, Jodie, calls the “four J’s” — Janis, Joan, Judy and Joni — largely (and minutely) imagines life as itinerary and playlist, with the 20th-century American songbook soundtracking the character’s every painstakingly mapped move.

Jodie is an only child growing up in St. Louis, the product of an affair between her mother, a onetime aspiring musical performer, and a married man-about-town no longer in the picture. Jodie’s grandparents live in the neighborhood, as do an aunt, a cousin — the charming, guitar-playing Brucie — and her Uncle Drew, a financial wizard who places a bet for her at the horse races, netting her a roll of $2 bills that gives her story of luck its start. Again and again throughout the book Jodie will return to that roll of bills, which assumes a talismanic charm as she goes to college to study music, joins a band, writes songs and cuts a record successful enough (with the wise advice of Uncle Drew) to free her of financial concerns for the rest of her songwriting, affair-having, house-buying, traveling, occasionally performing life.

All along, Jodie details her movements so meticulously that you could probably find your way around many St. Louis neighborhoods (and a few in England) with the novel in hand. This level of detail can appear gratuitous, but it comes to seem critical to Jodie’s character, who is always observing, from a slight distance, even what she herself does. Much of what she sees becomes grist for a song, but eventually you understand, as she does, that she is trying to figure out how to be in the world.

In high school she sits “on the john in the girls’ bathroom and listen[s] to the others gossip,” figuring “out a way to stay out of their conversations.” In college, she eavesdrops on her two roommates from Philadelphia talking about sex. Later, she makes an effort: “I watched how people reacted to and greeted one another. I also paid attention to the people who were walking together — how they talked and what their body language was. Then I would walk past a store window and observe myself.” Indeed, in time, she has “learned to show an interest in people and to feel a connection.”

This is life as a lesson in how to live, for which you must write your own instructions as you go along. Sometimes an insight emerges, sometimes a song, sometimes an epiphany, and it’s hard to say why, as when Jodie tells us that observing the behavior of a bird “changed my life,” or that the way a friend “talked about … things made me believe that life goes on.” Luckily, this is Jane Smiley, so the details, the insights, the songs — those she writes, and the dizzying assortment she mentions — are entertaining enough to follow.

In the Last Hundred Years Trilogy , which ran from around 1920 to 2020, Smiley viewed the American century through the filter of one family, whose members managed to experience or witness virtually every major event or trend encompassed by those years. Similarly, “Lucky” distills nearly a century through one character’s life — a life that in its general shape and many particulars seems to track with Smiley’s own. Which makes the late appearance of an even more Smiley-like character — a gawky girl who went to high school with Jodie and ended up publishing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a farm and one set in Greenland in the Middle Ages — somewhat trippy, only to be out-tripped by one last narrative twist that it would be unfair to give away.

And after Jane and Jodie and any remaining J’s get to our own dark days, and to “Lucky’s” vision of an even darker future, a twist — please, a full-scale dislocation! — is precisely what we need.

It’s a fitting conclusion to a novel whose narrator tells us that “the great enigma … was the sense you have, that comes and goes, of who you are, what the self is.”

Ellen Akins is the author of four novels and a collection of stories, “ World Like a Knife .”

By Jane Smiley

Knopf. 384 pp. $29

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