Tracy Thompson's Blog: Writing and Parenting (Don't Mix)

My 1995 book, The Beast: A Journey Through Depression, is being re-released this month by Diversion Books, with a new foreword! Available in both e-book and paperback. Hope you check it out!


The Beast: A Journey Through Depression

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.

I've just finished a book, which even I have a hard time believing; I go around the house saying, "I've finished the book" sometimes, just to get the feel of the words in my mouth--but anyway: this is the third book I've written but in some ways the first. The first two were about depression, and were written with first-hand experience very much in mind, and after them I got to a point where I had a major reaction: I did not want my life to be defined by some psychiatric condition. I cleaned out my study--gave away tons of books, stored some others, threw away tons of notes and papers, and eventually embarked on something new.

Which will be published next spring by Simon & Schuster. Entitled The New Mind of the South (and don't ask me the subtitle, I can never remember those things), it's about what it means to be a Southerner in our 21st century, supposedly post-racial era, when the South has become a mere marketing gimmick and otherwise doesn't much matter anymore. I think it does matter; I think the South is where some noble democratic ideals have met racial reality over the entire course of our nation's history, and this is still very much a work in progress. I love the South, I find it fascinating that there are still people who hold it in disdain--and yet, at the same time, I sigh and hold my head in my hands at some things that come out of it.

Be that as it may, I am now in that awkward phase: after manuscript completion, before publication. I have no idea of what to do with myself. Take up macrame? Scrapbooking? Oh, yeah--there seems to be some need to make some money, literary advances being the pitiful things that they are, so I've gotten a lead or two on that. But the reality of a freelance writer's life is that it's very much an up-and-down existence; you are either crazybusy or ready to volunteer to pick up litter along the highway, just for the sake of Something To Do. You never escape the horrible sense that the last thing you finished may indeed be the Last Thing, and that society has no further need for your endeavors--if indeed it ever did. And if you have kids, especially teen and pre-teen kids, they don't help. "Are you done with your book? When's it coming out? Why isn't it coming out sooner? How many people do you think will buy it?" Jesus H. Christ on a RAFT, do you think I know??

So today I called Beth, my longsuffering agent, and griped to her about my lack of purpose and sense of malaise, and she came up with a common-sense solution: "Think about what you want to write next." Which served to remind me: there is a huge pile of ironing upstairs.