Prelims

Half Title Page

Mad Muse

The Mental Illness Memoir in a Writer’s Life and Work

Series Page

Praise for Mad Muse:

“Jeffrey Berman’s Mad Muse: The Mental Illness Memoir in a Writer’s Life and Work is a tour-de-force. Examining autobiographies of writers who examine their own states of ‘madness’ from William Styron and Andrew Solomon to Kate Millett and Linda Gray Sexton, Berman teases out how best-selling accounts of mental illness both reveal and mask a writer’s struggle with their sense of displacement and dis-ease. Brilliantly written, the book should be on the desk of any reader who believes that such autobiographies are ‘self-help’ manuals in dealing with their own discomforts and displacements. A truly original work of both literary criticism and psychoanalytic insight.”

Sander L. Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University, USA

Jeffrey Berman’s Mad Muse is a very insightful, and beautifully written, account of memoirs of madness. Focusing on seven writers of memoirs of mental illness, he draws out the many dimensions of such writing, including helping to heal oneself and helping others to understand the experience of madness. His discussion of my own story is extremely well done. He manages to capture my experience and convey my effort to give a window into the mind of someone suffering with schizophrenia. He also highlights the experiences that helped me evade my “grave prognosis.” Finally, he does a wonderful job, as with the other memoirists, of connecting my academic work, in my case on mental health law, with my own story. Berman’s book is both insightful and—importantly—bound to have a positive effect on stigma. A really powerful work that should be widely read by consumers themselves, family members, mental health clinicians, mental health lawyers and advocates, and the general public.

Professor Elyn Saks, USC Gould School of Law and best-selling author of The Center Cannot Hold

“How does a writer write about his or her own mental illness? What is the role of a mental illness memoir in a writer’s life story? What part does the mental illness memoir play in our institutional narratives of mental illness? Jeffrey Berman has long been known for his lucid expositions on the relationships between psychoanalysis, literature, mental illness, and the creative imagination. Here Berman takes readers on a deeper journey. His tour of mental illness memoirs addresses some of the most important voices in American literature. To the question ‘is this new territory?’ Absolutely. And has he done it again? Yes, but better.”

Professor Dawn Skorczewski, Brandeis University, USA

Title Page

Mad Muse

The Mental Illness Memoir in a Writer’s Life and Work

By

Jeffrey Berman

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2019

Copyright © Jeffrey Berman, published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing.

Part of Chapter 1 is reprinted from Surviving Literary Suicide. Copyright © 1999 by Jeffrey Berman. Published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Author or the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78973-810-0 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-78973-807-0 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78973-809-4 (Epub)

Dedication

For Julie, Again, With Love

ALSO BY JEFFREY BERMAN

Joseph Conrad: Writing as Rescue

The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis

Narcissism and the Novel

Diaries to an English Professor: Pain and Growth in the Classroom

Surviving Literary Suicide

Risky Writing: Self-disclosure and Self-transformation in the Classroom

Empathic Teaching: Education for Life

Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning

Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-disclosure (with Patricia Hatch Wallace)

Death in the Classroom: Writing about Love and Loss

Companionship in Grief: Love and Loss in the Memoirs of C. S. Lewis, John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trillin

Death Education in the Writing Classroom

Dying in Character: Memoirs on the End of Life

Confidentiality and Its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy (with Paul W. Mosher)

Writing Widowhood: The Landscapes of Bereavement

Writing the Talking Cure: Irvin D. Yalom and the Literature of Psychotherapy

Off the Tracks: Cautionary Tales about the Derailing of Mental Health Care (with Paul W. Mosher) Vol. 1: Sexual and Nonsexual Boundary Violations; Vol. 2: Scientology, Psychoanalyst Meets Aliens, False Memories, The Scopes Trial of Psychoanalysis, Bizarre Surgery, Lobotomy, and the Siren Call of Psychopharmacology

Contents

Acknowledgments

In his 1969 book Totality and Infinity, the French philosopher and ethicist Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) argues for the importance of the face-to-face encounter with the suffering other as the basis of all witnessing. A personal encounter, he suggests, encourages empathy, openness, and engagement. I have taken Levinas’s words as literally as possible, sending chapters of the present book to the memoirists under discussion. I am deeply grateful to Kay Redfield Jamison, Linda Sexton, Andrew Solomon, and Elyn R. Saks for taking the time from their busy schedules to read and comment on my manuscript. They corrected factual errors, revealed additional information pertinent to my study, updated me on their lives and work, and allowed me to use their comments in this book. Their mental illness memoirs have proven inspirational to countless readers, including to scholars like myself, who recognize how illness is often a catalyst for creativity and a source of hope for others.

I would not have been able to conduct the research for this book without the invaluable help of the Interlibrary Loan staff at the University at Albany. Special thanks to Timothy Jackson, Angela Persico, and Glen Benedict for fulfilling scores of interlibrary requests.

I am grateful to the two anonymous readers for their many thoughtful suggestions for revision. One of the readers’ reports, nine single-spaced pages long, was the most detailed and helpful evaluation of a book-length manuscript I have received in a half century of scholarship. On one occasion, in the Styron chapter, I cite the reader’s own words, upon which I cannot improve. Thank you, both, whoever you are! I am alone responsible for whatever lingering weaknesses remain. Special thanks to Ben Doyle, Anna Scaife, and the entire staff of Emerald publishing, especially S. Rajachitra, Senior Project Manager, who was in charge of the production of the book.

Parts of my discussion of William Styron appeared in “Darkness Visible and Invisible: The Landscape of Depression in Lie Down in Darkness,” in The Critical Response to William Styron, ed. Daniel W. Ross (Westport, CT: Greenport, 1995, pp. 61–80), and in “William Styron and the Landscape of Depression,” in my book Surviving Literary Suicide (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). Part of my discussion of Kay Redfield Jamison’s Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire appeared in a review published in American Imago, vol. 75 (2018), 105–113.