Tracy Thompson's Blog: Writing and Parenting (Don't Mix) - Posts Tagged "mental-illness"
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It's always been hard for me to describe my writing career to other people, because it's followed such a meandering course. I've written one book about depression, one book about parenting, and one book about the 21st century South--and all this following a journalism career spent largely in courthouses, writing about legal affairs and doing investigative reporting. If I drove a car the way I write, I'd be one of those drivers other drivers yell at ("Pick a lane, lady!").
These days I find myself back at the starting point, in a way: my first book (The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression), which came out before the child who is now in college was even born, is being re-released in e-book and paperback format by Diversion Books, with a new forward written by me. I am thrilled. Well, "thrilled" may not be the precise word I want, because it's a book about some pretty awful things that happened to me, and there are some parts of it I'd write differently today--but I'm thrilled because it's a book I'm proud of, and because--if my reader reviews and e-mail is any indication--it's helped a lot of people. Depression is extremely common, and writers from William Styron to Brooke Shields have written memoirs about their experiences with it--but I think mine was the first that attempted to de-romanticize it (trust me, there is nothing romantic about mental illness) and portray it simply as an illness--one which increasingly warps one's personality the longer it goes unacknowledged. Far from being an affliction confined to artists and bona-fide geniuses, it affects a lot of regular people who manage to come across as fairly high-functioning, but who are in fact white-knuckling their way through life. That was me, for a lot of years--from the time I was a teenager, in fact. Needless to say, a lot of teenagers today are white-knuckling their way through adolescence; the stigma surrounding mental illness may be much less than it was when I was their age, but the pressures they are under are so much greater. I'm hoping that something in my story will help them sort out what's happening to them, and that their path to healing won't be as long as tortuous as mine.
Meanwhile, I'm still pondering what subject to tackle next. I'm thinking taxidermy. Or maybe 12th century Estonian history.
These days I find myself back at the starting point, in a way: my first book (The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression), which came out before the child who is now in college was even born, is being re-released in e-book and paperback format by Diversion Books, with a new forward written by me. I am thrilled. Well, "thrilled" may not be the precise word I want, because it's a book about some pretty awful things that happened to me, and there are some parts of it I'd write differently today--but I'm thrilled because it's a book I'm proud of, and because--if my reader reviews and e-mail is any indication--it's helped a lot of people. Depression is extremely common, and writers from William Styron to Brooke Shields have written memoirs about their experiences with it--but I think mine was the first that attempted to de-romanticize it (trust me, there is nothing romantic about mental illness) and portray it simply as an illness--one which increasingly warps one's personality the longer it goes unacknowledged. Far from being an affliction confined to artists and bona-fide geniuses, it affects a lot of regular people who manage to come across as fairly high-functioning, but who are in fact white-knuckling their way through life. That was me, for a lot of years--from the time I was a teenager, in fact. Needless to say, a lot of teenagers today are white-knuckling their way through adolescence; the stigma surrounding mental illness may be much less than it was when I was their age, but the pressures they are under are so much greater. I'm hoping that something in my story will help them sort out what's happening to them, and that their path to healing won't be as long as tortuous as mine.
Meanwhile, I'm still pondering what subject to tackle next. I'm thinking taxidermy. Or maybe 12th century Estonian history.
Writing and Parenting (Don't Mix)
A blog about writing and parenting. Simultaneously.
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