Anyone familiar with bipolar illness will recognize the repeated roller-coaster cycling and the difficulty in finding and maintaining a stabilizing medicine combination.

Madness is difficult to put down. As you turn the pages to find that one day she is a successful, wealthy, on-top-of-the-world, happily married editor, and the next a miserable, shuffling, robe-wearing, stringy-haired patient in a mental institution with little or no grasp of reality… though, all the while, you know she is very real. You can never doubt the authenticity of the person behind the sometimes audacious and sometimes pitiful behavior.

Somehow, through all of it, she hangs onto a thread, and with that thread, she is able to weave an incredible life. In Madness Marya retrieves it all well enough to share her story with the world.

I, for one, am grateful that she did.

I am now reading Electroboy. Good thing they didn’t meet! lol