Oh man, I saw this in the bookstore along with Oate's memoir of being a widow and just couldn't deal (especially not after Didion's lacerating book). I think the last book I enjoyed of Jamison's was Night Falls Fast, which was pretty good.

Jamison is on my radar as a prominent person with a disability, though she has never explicitly articulated a disabled identity. Her An Unquiet Mind is a hugely important book, politically speaking, and I salute her for outing herself as someone with severe bipolar, and effectively painting a target on her back

It's interesting -- I mean, I think she is one of the very few mental health professionals to come out and say she's mentally ill (remember that great line in Unquiet Mind where her boss says If we fired everyone with a mental illness at Hopkins, nobody would be left, or something like that), and that took an enormous amount of guts and her book is one of the big Destigmatizing Moments in Modern Mental Illness Memoirs (I have, seriously, a collection of these. Another big Moment for me was Styron's journalism pieces/memoir, but anyway).

But she also wrote it in the context of, here's a very accomplished professional woman with tenure at a highly regarded medical school who's already written very successful books and had a high-powered career, just as Martha Manning was also at I think Hopkins and Tracy Thompson a reporter for the Washington Post (like I said, I have a collection). Of course part of it is the emphasis on the fact that someone you know, the person sitting right next to you in the board meeting who looks Absolutely Fine, could have this illness, and how would you know if they didn't tell you? but there's also an emphasis, at least in the American publishing market, on the high-functioning end of the spectrum. (For example, I love Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story; I read it a few years before I sobered up, it helped me sober up, I still reread it, and I think it's a wonderful book. But there's also this persistent thread of 'here I am, this young professional with a glowing career and established track record, who Also Happens to have this soul-eating disorder.')

Anyway, tl;dr blah blah if this is boring or offensive I apologize in advance because I'm giddy with flu and stuffed to the gills with OTC medicine. I'm just struck by the redemptionist arc in a lot of American memoirs, as if disability can be just one more thing that can be Overcome by sheer pluck and ingenuity and perspiration -- I don't think Knapp and Jamison and other memoir-writers necessarily meant to emphasize that, or even do it consciously. (And the redemptionist arc is all over AA too, hoo boy.) Maybe it's how the brain needs that kind of powerful narrative form to help pound itself into recovery? What would a less absolutist? story look like, and would it even be possible in a linear narrative? I don't even know.

TL;DR GOD, MOI, STFU AND GO BACK TO BED

Oh, man, this is interesting, because I've totally been thinking about this same question, but from a different direction. I was articulating it as 'there's a privilege gained in success to be more in-your-face disabled.' Because you've . . . participated in the We Shall Overcome narrative, you know? Which in my case means that the privilege of academic success got me a job where I can basically ask for any accommodation I want without ever worrying that I'm too expensive, too disabled, because hey, they've got the money. And I was successful so that's okay, because I'm "worth it."

Because yeah, you don't see these memoirs from the other 90%, the people whose incredible accomplishment is actually surviving with a disability on food stamps and government aid. Which is pretty remarkable, IMHO. But that ain't heartwarming. The truth of overwhelming poverty for this community isn't pretty.

And yeah, I think this class of books is very much written for the professional colleague, the relatively affluent and upwardly mobile. Which is it's own thing.

Lightreads wrote: "I was articulating it as 'there's a privilege gained in success to be more in-your-face disabled.' Because you've . . . participated in the We Shall Overcome narrative, you know? Which in my case means that the privilege of academic success got me a job where I can basically ask for any accommodation I want without ever worrying that I'm too expensive, too disabled, because hey, they've got the money. And I was successful so that's okay, because I'm "worth it."

Oh, yeah -- IIRC Thompson even talks about that some, how in her case she was Award-Winning Writer for the Post and that was a large part of her identity, and she was terrified when she wrote her original article saying she'd been depressed and suicidal that her career was over, and she only dared do it because she'd built up all those accomplishments that other people couldn't deny. It's like that American binary categorization of people as Success/Failure, so when someone is a floor wax AND a dessert topping "a psychiatrist AND manic-depressive" or "a reporter AND an alcoholic" the reaction is like BZZT BZZT WAIT WHAT.

you don't see these memoirs from the other 90%, the people whose incredible accomplishment is actually surviving with a disability on food stamps and government aid. Which is pretty remarkable, IMHO. But that ain't heartwarming

Yeah. That. Exactly. Because I think that's one of the narratives that gets counted as "Failure" (on food stamps, not having a job, unable to leave the house, &c &c). Not hey, this person's not dead, they're enjoying some quality of life and making it! but They don't have shit in their WIN column, so.... It reminds me of Woolf writing about the masses of poor women whose lives don't get written about because they're not important enough. And then the question becomes, by what standard, in whose judgement? &c &c.

And yeah, I think this class of books is very much written for the professional colleague, the relatively affluent and upwardly mobile

Yeah, totally....people make fun of the "Oprah effect," or the "self-help/recovery/memoir movement," altho in my view openly discussing and destigmatizing issues like disability and addiction and mental illness is always a good thing. But it's also, at least in today's publishing market, very....limited (which is one reason, and I will go on about this at length, why I think James Frey's memoir was so universally accepted despite being Full of Shit even before Smoking Gun got to work on him: he fit the template perfectly, especially in his anti-AA anti-group rabidly pro-individualist stance. His image was like he was the Horatio Alger of addiction).

Excellent review and equally interesting comments afterwards. Completely agree that exploring the distinction between grief and depression would have been interesting and worthwhile. A shame the author went another direction. And also agree that memoirs of survival rather than triumph are sadly lacking. The balance is skewed and ignores those for whom survival IS triumph.