"The lithium makes me thirsty."

(Jamison speaking at the University of Virginia)

Last month, we went to Politics and Prose to hear Kay Jamison read from her book Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir. Even though it was a rainy Saturday evening, the small neighborhood bookstore was packed. During the question and answer session, audience member after audience member stood up to thank Jamison for being brave enough to detail her grief over her husband's death as well as to share her struggles with bipoloar disorder. Her books, they said, had given them courage in their own struggles.

In writing An Unquiet Mind, the autobiography in which she reveals her mental illness, Jamison, a clinical psychologist and professor at Johns Hopkins, risked much professionally and personally. She chose not to treat patients after writing the book and feared the stigma attached to bipolar disorder. But by telling her story, and telling it as a way to get at a larger truth and the reality of her disorder, she has affected numerous readers, many of whom also feel at war with themselves as they deal with mental illness.

Many writers, especially memoir writers but even fictions writers, often grapple with what it means to bear their inner lives to the world, to leave something of themselves behind with their readers. Sometimes telling the truth is dangerous; sometimes it hurts the people we would otherwise protect, but what integrity remains in writing if we work in half truths and continue to remain silent when we should speak? By writing, we try to get at something essential, something that matters because it reaches others.

Hearing Jamison read reminded me of another book, for which she wrote the introduction: Unholy Ghost (edited by Nell Casey). The book is a collection of essays by renowned writers (including William Styron, Susanna Kaysen, Larry McMurtry, and Ann Beattie) on depression. It is another book in which writers unveil their darkest moments to get at a greater understanding of what it means to live with mental illness. The collection demonstrates the need to know we are not alone in our suffering, and these writers serve us in learning how to live by facing the hardest details head on.

In "Noontime," Lauren Slater explores what it means to be bipolar and pregnant:

The lithium makes me thirsty. The Klonopin helps me sleep. The thirst is tremendous and healing, gallons of coldwater going in me, my heart calmed in a cool sea.
...
I go, furtively, to the children's section of the store, where infant clothes hang on racks. I look around me to make sure no one is watching, though the secret is I can't say. I feel enormously self-concious handling these tiny outfits, these odd hooded gowns like what a miniature monk might wear. How do you care at noontime? I finger the frills on a little dress. There is a study that scares me. Schizophrenic mothers were compared to depressed mothers and it was found that the schizophrenic women were more effective as parents, because even though they were as crazy as bats, at least they were alive, they were responsive.

And I think of that study, standing very still in a store at Christmastime, holding an infant's dress in my hand and finding it definitely not cute. The pumpkin, too, is not cute and yet I am no longer crying, no longer thrashing about for breath. I will design my own kind of motherhood, a different kind of motherhood, this is what I think. Please God, make me well enough to love whoever she is. This is also what I think. I think the medications must be working, for my thoughts are clear, my mood even, my apphrehension deep but with a bottom.

These accounts are at times difficult to read, but for many readers they bring comfort because they are honest no matter how scary reality proves.

More to come on integrity in writing in view of Irene Vilar's memoir, Impossible Motherhood.

Also, thoughts tonight for Loni and the Mykol family.

--C.