'A deeply reassuring essential read' Sunday Independent
'Visceral and honest' Telegraph
'Bryony Gordon is a terrific, compassionate writer' Elizabeth Day
'Bryony writes with such entertaining and brazen candour about mental illness...she really helps people tackle their own stuff. Her writing has helped me before and this will be another hit' Matt Haig
'A startlingly candid book' Daily Mail
'Gordon injects lightness into the darkness as she recounts her relapse into OCD and subsequent steps to recovery' Red Magazine THE HOTLY ANTICIPATED FOLLOW-UP TO SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*, MAD GIRL
What if our notion of what makes us happy is the very thing that's making us so sad?
Ten years on from first writing about her own experiences of mental illness, Bryony Gordon still receives messages about the effect it has on people. Now perimenopausal and well into the next stage of her life, parenting an almost-adolescent, just what has that help - and that connection with other unwell people - taught Bryony about herself, and the society we live in? What has she learned, and why have her views on mental health changed so radically? After coming out the other side of the biggest trauma of our living memory - a global pandemic - existing in a state of perma-crisis has now become our new normal.
From burnout and binge eating, to living with fluctuating hormones and the endless battle to stay sober, Bryony begins to question whether she got mental illness wrong in the first place. Is it simply a chemical imbalance, or rather a normal response from your brain telling you that something isn't right? Mad Woman explores the most difficult of all the lessons she's learned over the last decade - that our notion of what makes a happy life is the very thing that's making us so sad.
Bestselling author Bryony Gordon is unafraid to write with her trademark blend of compassion, honesty and humour about her personal challenges and demons, which means her books and journalism have had profound impact on readers. She founded the mental health charity, Mental Health Mates, which has become a vast online community.
*Bryony Gordon's Mad Woman was a Sunday Times bestseller on 18th Feb 2024. *Bryony Gordon's Mad Girl was a number one Sunday Times bestseller on 12th June 2016.
Listening to this audiobook feels like listening to a voice message from a best friend.
Each chapter is hilarious and the mental health insights were defo a wake up call for myself. I'm downloading all the other audiobooks from this author ASAP!
Bryony writes honestly and openly about life with addiction and mental illness as well as mentioning the menopause as a woman in her early forties. On top of all of this, she is also a wife, mother, writer, marathon runner (twice!) and an all round inspirational person - even though she probably wouldn’t agree.
Thank you Bryony for writing a book for all of us mad women pushing through life whilst working and raising families then trying to be a good partner and worthwhile friend, to say nothing of keeping fit and healthy whilst spinning 101 different plates.
We are all mad here. This book will resonate in some way with all women.
Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to read and review.
tbh just don’t think i’m the target audience for this! some parts of this were thought-provoking and other parts utterly naff. i simply don’t chime with the brand of liberal feminism that this writer is targeting
I have read/listened to the audio for most of Bryony Gordon's books. I really like Gordon and her honesty. I usually get a lot out of her books - specifically her personal thoughts and experience with mental health and addiction. I just don't really understand why she has written this book. It didn't add anything to what she has previously spoken about in her books. Just didn't get anything new from this and found it repetitive to whats been said before.
I previously read Bryony Gordon's 'Glorious Rock Bottom' about her experience of addiction and how she got sober, which was excellent. Gordon is a writer who is able to write about difficult things in a highly relatable, accessible and yet real way. I really appreciate how much of herself she gives in her books and how she doesn't try to gloss over the horrible bits or make it seem like everything was easy for her. You can see the effort it costs her and because she is willing to be vulnerable, you believe her and feel that change might be possible for you, too. In this book, she talks about how her eating and OCD started going off the rails in lockdown and how she dealt with and is still dealing with the repercussions of that. I admire her enormously. When you front a mental health charity as she does, and have written books about recovery, it must be incredibly hard to have to admit that there are other problems that you are perhaps not dealing with as graciously as it might appear. It is to her credit that she doesn't flinch from baring her soul and brings the same honesty and vulnerability to bear in this book.
I was particularly interested and heartened to read about her relationship with PMDD. It's something I suffered with, undiagnosed for many years. Eventually I had surgery to 'cure' my issues, but I had to fight so hard to be heard and seen and diagnosed and it's brilliant that Bryony has begun to take that conversation out into the world.
Similarly to Bryony I have an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder diagnosis and her first book Mad Girl is up there as one of my favourite books due to how comforting I found it at a difficult time, so I was eagerly waiting the ten year follow-up. As was the case with Mad Girl Bryony has a real skill for writing about what it is like to live with OCD and the impact that it has on your life. It is a follow-up to Mad Girl and in addition to talking about OCD this book also has a strong focus on binge-eating disorder, peri-menopause and alcoholism which are additional diagnoses that Bryony has had within the last 10 years. It would be unfair not to have included all of them as it is Bryony's account of the last 4 years of her life but at times there was a lot going on which didn't make for a particularly clear read, possibly separate books could have been written for some of them.
It isn't a self-help book, it's more of a diary of Bryony's life since the pandemic and if you have read any of her other books then this one does not deviate from her established style. I enjoy her writing, it is friendly and informal and whilst I cannot comment on the other illnesses and disorders she writes about in this book, she pinpoints with accuracy what it is like to live with OCD and as this was my motivation for reading this book these were the sections I found myself getting the most from. A particular bit that stuck out for me was listening to the small voice within your soul when often everything else is shouting over it and telling you that you're a bad person.
One small criticism was that I felt a lot of the conversations between Bryony and others were quite obviously engineered for the purpose of the book and/or exaggerated for effect and I began to find it jarring as I read on. Ones that stood out for me were the conversations with the paramedics, the ones with Holly and also the ones with Edith from the private IUD fitting.
I'd recommend this book to anyone who might be going through some of the same things as Bryony, it's an easy read and I think most people would take something from it, however for me it wasn't as affecting as her first book on OCD. I would have liked to have read more on Bryony's recovery processes as whilst it was briefly covered I think it was probably too fresh to delve further in to, I'd have preferred the book to have been delayed a little if it were to enable more about this, maybe there will be a follow-up book?
A brilliant continuation from Mad Girl, post pandemic, that really highlighted the difficulty of those with mental health conditions during and after the covid lockdowns. And the audiobook version was particularly fantastic due to Bryony’s familiar nature.
The only element I struggled with was the preaching towards the end around the difficulties of living in a patriarchal society - but hey, maybe that’s just the patriarchy working on me.
Listening to Bryony always feels easy and enjoyable, and this time I learnt so much about the menopause in a lighthearted and fun way. At times this book repeated a lot of the stuff we heard in Mad Girl but was still an great funny listen
I was glad of the discussion of the fact you can't 'win' mental health, it's an ongoing journey over shifting territory. I liked the lists. Would recommend to any woman who is/was a little (or a lot) mad.
First half of the book was trying too hard. Second half grabbed me by the collar of all my relative struggles.
She’s funny, honest, and brave enough to learn in public. She’s literally failing and growing in-front of everyone, and despite of critics’ shaming, that’s ok.
Also the book made me realize I, too, have replaced my OCD with binge eating, and that’s not ok.
I love the books from Bryony. I’ve read quite a few now and this one is one that I think we should all read. It’s such an open and honest read through many issues like addiction, menopause and mental health. Thoroughly recommend.
I was really looking forward to this book. I’ve read all her other ones and very much enjoyed them. This one was so disappointing that I didn’t even finish it, I gave up at the “BG news” bit. It felt like a mish mash of all her other books, but with a splash of Covid. There are uninteresting excerpts from her iPhone, and random lists that felt like she was trying to fill pages. I feel Bryony didn’t actually have enough “content” for this book, and if I had to read “Jareth the Goblin King” or “Stay puft marshmallow man” one more time I was going to lose it.
“It’s a rhetorical question, of course, but I still have plenty of answers to it. What the fuck is wrong with me, above and beyond the…eating disorder and the alcoholism and the creaking knees” and the OCD? “Let me count the fucking ways.”
“I am not mad–or…I am mad, but that is OK, because I’m not bad.” I am a human. “I had a child; I saw the magic of my body; I started eating normally; I stopped drinking and taking drugs; I discovered that exercise was not about the losses, but the gains, and…I did it for how it made me feel rather than how it made me look…I didn’t develop confidence, just a desire not to spend another moment of my precious life hating on my self” and choose happiness instead.
Happy is not “an ending, a destination, a place where you made a mighty effort to get to and then, having made that effort, you got to stay there for the rest of your life.” Happy “is more of a moveable feast, the emotional equivalent of winning an Olympic gold medal and immediately having to start training for the European Championships.”
Bryony Gordon’s Mad Woman is “a shining beacon of sanity in a sea of people who can’t even begin to acknowledge their problems…They spend their entire lives doing everything they can not to look at them…They tell me again and again that they’re not addicts, they’re not alcoholics, they’re not depressed, they’re just fine. Fine. F-I-N-E” is how mental illness is spelled in conversation. “Survival is for people in war zones…Survival is not a viable state” of being. I don’t want to survive, I want to thrive.
“The thing about your generation…is you have a chance. I used to think that meant you had a chance to smash through glass ceilings and have it all, but actually you have a chance to take yourselves seriously. To not dismiss yourselves simply because you happened to have been born with two X chromosomes…We look at unspeakable things and we see them as gifts. We see them glitter. We have learned to pan for gold in the dark.”
I bought this a few weeks ago as I have enjoyed Bryony Gordon's other books. At first I thought, why has she written another book? There is nothing new here. But, as I kept reading I was hooked and understood why.
This book starts with Gordon enjoying an idyllic New Year's Eve on a family holiday in Thailand at the end of 2019. She finally feels at peace with herself, of course a few months later we all went in to lockdown due to the pandemic. But Bryony Gordon is fine. She is coping just fine and the amount of chorizo she binges on at 2am in the morning is by the by...
Once I had read the first 50 pages of this book I was gripped. Gordon thought she was coping but thanks to her husband, her therapist and her friend Holly she realised Jareth the goblin king had returned as well as a new addiction to binge eating. However, she also had some physical health problems which were only diagnosed when she saw a female doctor. Gordon starts to realise that women are still not taken seriously and becomes more interested in female empowerment and has to come to terms with her perimenopause. I enjoyed the passion and anger she found and loved that moment when she surprised a male doctor about how many triathlons she had done...
An interesting book about OCD, Binge eating as well as the important of listening to your body if your physical health feels off. There was also an empowering message about ageing in the last few sections of the book which will help me someday.
From menopause to mental illness, burnout to binge eating — Mad Woman is an incisive conversation about why so many women today are struggling to keep it together under the intense pressure of a patriarchal, capitalist world.
Part memoir, part recovery guide and part conversation with a good friend; Bryony talks about her own experiences with addiction, mental illness and womanhood, showing her personal journey from the worst moments of her life to the best but without glamourising the struggle and being so realistic but always hopeful.
It read easily, like she was telling us the story directly and talking to us about everything she’s seen, everything that the world puts in the way to make us seem and feel mad. With snippets of phone notes, random thoughts and more structured sections, it had a great pace and I just kept going till I ran out of pages.
And as someone who has dealt with OCD and disordered eating in my life, I found not only a connection but a strange kind of relief and catharsis in her writing just knowing someone out there gets it.
Thank you, NetGalley and Headline Books, for a gifted copy of this recent release.
I have always admired Bryony Gordon for her honest, raw, and blunt truths about her experiences with mental health. This follow-up to "Mad Girl" is another well-deserved five-star read. Gordon has the talent and creativity to make her books informative yet entertaining. Her ability to laugh at herself without playing down her diagnosis is genius, and I am in awe of her.
In this new release, she covers a lot of relatable topics, including the effects of the pandemic, menopause, eating disorders, addictions, dealing with new diagnoses, and more. It feels like a warm embrace from a close friend. The audiobook is narrated by Gordon herself, making it even more enjoyable. Only she can bring this book to life as it should be.
If you plan on reading just one non-fiction book in the future, make sure it's this one!
Thanks to Mad Woman, I got to learn more and the truth behind menopause, OCD, binge eating, and even addiction from the author’s own experiences. Nope, it’s not a theoretical kind of book😅 I felt more like listening to other woman’s yapping about her ups and downs facing her mental illness and addiction, until she finally recovered and let go of the burdens. Blunt, honest, and straight to the facts💯
My favorite takeaway of this book: ‘You are not mad just because you have mental illness. You just live in a world that wanted you small, compliant, biddable; that wanted you not to take up too much space that might be better used by someone else, someone male. In a world that wanted you to look hot, be quiet, smile sweetly, act nice, make money, have kids, not complain. You just live in a world that thinks you’re the problem.’
It takes a lot of courage to put your mental health out there for the world to comment on, there's a lot here that potentially might resonate with many people.
Personally I didn't really understand what it was trying to say, the conclusion was very flimsy indeed. In fact I found it all a bit flimsy. It was a bit self absorbed and pointless. Did I need to know which children's toys Gordon relates to or her suggestions for 80s films one could name their mental illness after?
I think there was an element of adding fun aspects to a challenging topic but it just served to highlight how little substance the book has.
Bryony is an absolutely amazing writer, but what I love and admire most about her books is her honesty. She doesn't hold back. She doesn't sugarcoat things. She tells it like it is, raw cooking chorizo and all!
I always get really emotional reading her books, but this one got me. It really got me. I sobbed so much. I can't put into words how incredibly brilliant Mad Woman is. It's genuinely life changing, lifesaving even.
No words I could string together would ever do this book justice, so I'm going to stop trying now. Just read it. Now.
Mad Woman by Bryony Gordon Published by Headline Books on 15/2/24
A raw and brutally honest description of the authors struggles with mental health issues. And, a timely reminder of the massive impact the pandemic had on people already dealing with these struggles . Not always an easy read but you find yourself really willing her on the whole way. As she deals with all that life throws at her. Very relatable.
Thanks to the author, publisher and the Netgalley for providing me with this advance digital copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion.