My Body Is a Book of Rules

by Elissa Washuta

We were captivated by Elissa Washuta’s voice from the first sentence of her debut. Using an array of sidelong tactics – letters, scripts, transcripts, book reviews, diary entries, Cosmo quizzes, histories of her American Indian ancestors, lists and litanies – Washuta creates a portrait of her identity, all the more riveting for being in crisis. As Washuta navigates her early twenties, a cross-country move, addiction and bipolar disorder and sexual trauma (just your standard stuff), she leavens the deepest darkness with unexpected humor as she invites the reader eternally further into her brain, creating a work that’s as important as it is entrancing. At the end, you’re left wanting more, and grateful to the author for finally figuring out how to take good enough care of her brain and body so that she can live to write more books.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Essays, Mental Health, Indigenous, Biography Memoir, Feminism

266 pages, ebook

First published August 12, 2014

About the author

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

A piercing, innovative memoir that delves into bipolar disorder, sexual assault, American Indian ethnic identity and more. Elissa Washuta lays herself bare and examines her experiences with a keen eye for emotion and human fallibility. All of the topics in My Body Is a Book of Rules, ranging from mental illness to consent and sexual violence, carry such importance despite society's stigma. Washuta uses a more experimental style of writing to convey the dark, messy, yet ultimately fundamental truths of her life. I felt most drawn to the sections about religion's impact on her development as well as her chapters about her relationship with medication. I struggled to connect at points because of the more experimental, disjointed framework of the book - similar to my struggle with Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts - but I would still recommend it to those interested in any of the topics the book touches upon.

[Ellis · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Yes, I am tired of rape stories . . . I am sick of rape stories on CNN and sicker of rape stories on Jezebel. I would like instead to see national, televised debates and full episodes of morning radio shows and several long-form podcasts and a portion of the next State of the Union address dedicated to determining whether men should be allowed to keep their dicks.” - Sarah Nicole Prickett

Seriously. Read through “Faster Than Your Heart Can Beat,” the fourth essay in this book, and see how you feel. I deliberately left out a line from Prickett’s original quote: “I think rape stories are boring,” because well, I don’t. I am not sick of reading rape stories because I want women to tell them if that’s what they want and need. I want men to tell their stories of being sexually assaulted too. I'm sick of them because every single frwaking* thing that I’ve read in the past few months that was written by a woman has contained, like an oyster with a nasty pearl, a rape story. A personal story about rape. A second-hand story about rape. A newsworthy story about rape. And pundits & reporters & politicians go merrily along, talking about legitimacy and forcefulness and worrying about the lives of the poor, poor men, the miniscule fraction of which who commit these acts of violation and get reported and get caught, that tiny proportion of dudes who might not have a chance to go on acting like they’ve done nothing frwaking wrong. I am so very sick and so very tired of living in a world where there are just so many rape stories that are being told, a world where this is so commonplace, where these crimes happen with such frequency that they are practically the norm and not the totally bizarre, WTF, who-would-do-this-to-another-human-being anomaly they should be.

I put off actually finishing this book for about a week because I knew that I was going to have to review it, no blank four stars for this one, & I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to in the way that I really needed & wanted to.

Elissa Washuta starts her book out with a story about being bipolar. I have read a lot of these. A., the woman I called my best friend for most of my twenties, is bipolar & I’ve sought out & read lots and lots of books about bipolar women in an attempt to try to get the slightest inkling of what she was going through that summer when she had her first hypomanic episode since I’d known her (In fact, I can’t wait to read A.’s book about her experiences because I know she’s got one in her). I read the back cover of this book, “As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren’t threatening her life . . . “ to that point & immediately thought, okay, yes, this is enough for me to know that I should read this. But this is not like anything of those books at all.

Washuta’s lucidity and self-awareness and the clarity of her shockingly good prose is truly amazing. This book is like getting kicked in the stomach. This is about being bipolar and rape and being Native American and medication and Kurt Cobain and mixed mania and my god, she can just pull it all together in such forceful, incredible way, there were times that I felt sort of afraid to pick this up and keep reading it.

I can’t possibly start citing passages from this, because if I start I won’t be able to stop (but here's one that I remember off of the top of my head: “My heart is stuck up in a tree, waiting for you to knock it down with a stick”). This is a great book. This is a brilliant book & I hope that Washuta continues to write & publish because I plan to read everything she comes up with. But I am just so fucking sick of reading rape stories.

*This was a typo that I thought ended up being beautiful, so I left it.

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book can be intense, but I also found it refreshing. At first I thought "refreshing" might be an odd way to describe a book that so deeply explores cultural identity, rape, and bipolar disorder--but Elissa Washuta makes it so with her strong, clear voice and non-traditional form. This book is honest, authentically self-deprecating, and a little devastating, but also a little hopeful.

I absolutely love the way this book plays with form. I very much felt like I was exploring with her by looking back at old documents and filtering them through more years of experience and reflection. I liked that some details repeated, but in different ways, from different angles, through different lenses--which felt very much like one might obsessively try to process what the hell is going on/who am I going to be?/why am I like this?/where am I going?/etc.

I could relate to this in so many ways without having many directly relatable experiences, which is a testament to how well-done the book is as a whole and how strong Washuta's voice is. I imagine this book will be important to many people--many women and many writers--in many ways.

[Rennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this after her new book White Magic was a strange experience, because you can see how many themes and ideas and quirks and style in general were being honed and would eventually lead to that incredible book. I’m not sure how I would’ve felt about it if I didn’t already know how much I love her writing, I think I may have written it off despite the impact it unarguably has. And it has lots of gorgeous lines and gut-wrenching concepts.
My favorites:

That year, while I worked toward leaving Maryland, my body, never a temple, became a haunted house.

Even my vagina has had enough of you.

I could not un-rape myself, but I could make myself wanted and flawless, could fix the body so that I could be certain that the body is not the problem here. One by one, even if I had to make myself an unrecognizable line drawing of my normal likeness, I would knock down every problem.

[Jessie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This memoir, written as a series of essays, mostly explored Washuta’s college years, namely her identity as an Indigenous person who grew up fair and far from culture, her bipolar disorder experiences and treatment, her experiences of sexual assault, and her messy process of recovery and living. I had a few issues with the book. I didn’t feel like it covered much content, it felt a bit like circling the drain. We didn’t get to know anyone but Elissa, and she mostly wrote about the same things again and again without pulling me into the narrative at all. It was disjointed, and she seemed disassociated from her topic. Also. She wrote in a style that I believe she referred to as
“edgy” in an included online dating profile. I would argue that it was unformed, and maybe a device to distract from what was missing from the book. There was a chapter written as a law and order SVU script (dialogue only), a chapter written as a university study on the ways that students describe intimacy (with a million footnotes), and a chapter that mimicked medical charting. I have to be honest, it was both gimmicky, and a slog! I think if she’s followed traditional narrative style, she would have had two chapters at most! She did provide some insight into a bipolar mixed state that was neat to read, but overall, I was surprised by how little I could connect with this book.

[Leah Levine Kaminsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each section of Elissa Washuta’s strikingly original My Body is a Book of Rules is distinct, and yet, just as a body’s many parts – it’s interwoven physicalities – give rise to the unique abstractions of cognition, perception, the mind, and the soul, the book itself ultimately coheres to form a powerful, at times hilarious, at other times devastating whole.

These unique parts exist both in the body and the mind that are explored here, as well as in several, interlocked themes: bipolar disorder; sexual assault; Catholicism; native identity. Unlike the vast majority of the books that have touched on any one of these terrains, Washuta finds her meaning in a non-traditional structure that comes to mirror her mind and her body’s journey as she moves from her childhood into her adult years.

At first, each theme is explored in relatively distinct and varied forms that are intriguingly original. Along with more traditional analytical sections, which in themselves are laced with sharp insights and piercing humor, there is: (1) an anthropological academic study of the term “hooked up” as it is used on college campuses; (2) a grid that juxtaposes quotes from Law and Order SVU next to Washuta’s self-written dialogue about her own sexual assaults; (3) a hilarious Match.com profile; (4) a strangely moving dialogue with a GPS; (5) many, many footnotes, which often undercut the text they modify.

Each of these original forms not only capture the many varied, conflicting, and devastatingly *real* workings of Washuta’s experiences and of her mind, but also to highlight how drastically earlier explorations of these areas, especially in relation to bipolar disorder, have failed. Time and time again it struck me that the other explorations I have read of the disorder have almost been working too hard to translate the bipolar experience for a non-bipolar world, and in doing so shed the shape and the color of the bipolar mind, leaving us only with vague generalizations of the experience – words like “mood swings” and “on a high,” which mean something entirely different to every reader. In contrast, Washuta’s forms, even with all of their internal conflict and contradictions (scratch that, *because of*) are specific, precise, understandable and identifiable. There is no escape for the reader; there is no way not to see.

Of course, being a (relatively) young woman in the world, there were parts I found more identifiable than others. I was particularly moved by the many explorations of female agency, victimhood vs. culpability, and the lies we tell ourselves as we try to determine what it means to “own our sexuality” while moving through a world in which we are repeatedly told we don’t deserve that agency (or, like, that we should take it, but only in a way that’s acceptable to the people who don’t actually want to relinquish it). I absolutely loved the Match.com profile, and again the footnotes create a brilliant dialogue, at once undercutting the main text on the page and confirming the need for its existence.

Other areas with which I didn’t personally identify instead did what I feel all great literature should: allow me a window into a mind and a set of experiences that aren’t mine, so I can better understand people who aren’t me. There are many sections that are uncomfortable to read, and yet I felt a responsibility to face that discomfort head-on, just as Washuta had done in the writing of it; I’m grateful that I did, and I’m grateful for that opportunity examine my own scars and biases in the process.

As a reader primarily of more traditional forms, you would think, after the tumult of the first half of the book that I would feel relieved as the forms calmed into a more linear state – and I did. I relaxed along with Washuta, I felt relieved to have found more clarity and control in the text as she found it in the right cocktail of medications. And yet, I felt that same sense of loss as the author – the loss of all of those feelings, and of that breadth of experience. What can my feelings be but evidence of just how effective the narrative was at moving me so closely through the bipolar experience?

As a fellow writer and a feeling person in the world, I identify with the chafing Washuta articulates when she hears that many other people have been through this, and that it will all be okay. We do all want to be individuals, after all, and it is true and important that no one else has experienced being all these things *as Elissa Washuta*. And yet, the book still helped me gain a much deeper understanding of what it means to be so many broader identities that extend far beyond Washuta herself – bipolar, native, female, young – and I am again grateful for that broadening. She *is* uniquely Elissa Washuta in the end. It just so happens that Elissa Washuta, with her “fucked up brain,” and string of sexual assaults and 1/32nd native blood and need to touch and be touched and love and be loved and obsession with sneakers and hatred of hiking happens to be someone we can all root for and want to know.

There are moments when Washuta’s prose is so pointed and precise, it hurts, but it’s in that way that says, “I know you.” It pinpoints exactly how I’ve felt, how I imagine others have felt, and the exact shape of the injustice at hand.

My Body is a Book of Rule is a reclaiming of mind, story, identity and form. And yet it is a release, too.

Thank, you, Elissa, for being all of these things, for writing this book, and for being you.

[El · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir (along with Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else) was on some list about different ways of telling ones memoir. Elissa Washuta's memoir is... I don't quite know what it is. It is not like any memoir you've read before, that is for sure, and that's what I love about it.

She tells about being raped in college, and sexually assaulted beyond that. She tells about having bipolar disorder. She tells about being Native American but looking white, and about her struggles with identity. It's all wonderfully told and in a strange, fluid, random way.

Pieces of what she calls "Cascade Autobiography," chapters/essays modeled off of medical records, pieces of her own text messages/IMs, a Law & Order: SVU script to help her process her own experiences, critical theories on popular cultures of Kurt Cobain, Britney Spears, and more, "A Preliminary Bibliography."

It's not an easy book to read. Washuta has dealt with so much, and as someone six years my junior (I think that's about right), I'm in awe. She has been through some shit.

We've all been through shit, though, in some way or another, right? The difference is she chose to write about it, in painful, raw detail. It's so raw she might as well have cut her skin opened and bled across the page. It's so raw that I could only read pieces of it at a time because I found myself going into a very dark place at times while reading it. Which isn't even a criticism, it's just the nature of her story. It doesn't make it any less an important read.

I plan on reading more by Washuta and following her career. When I think about writing essays, and writing in a non-traditional format (which clearly I think about way too fucking much these days), this is the sort of thing I think of.

At times, however, mostly towards the end, it all became so fragmented that I thought the whole thing lacked coherence. This could be reflective of her own mental state, it could be entirely intentional. Either way is totally fine. As I drew to the close, I was reminded of a book I read years ago that I actually hated, but this made me wonder if I was too harsh on it at the time: Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. In that case, Wurtzel was so messed up on drugs that I really do think it affected her writing. I don't think that's the case here with Washuta's memoir. But I do think that with a more avant garde style of writing, it can be easy to lose one's way after a while.

Still, I found it so interesting (and painfully so at times) that I can mostly overlook even that.

A Cascade Autobiography

Part 5

When I was nine, in our New Jersey history class, we learned about the Lenni Lenape who had come before us. They seemed even further away than my own Indians because they had been right here, but the textbook said they were gone. When I was ten, a classmate told me she was Indian, too, and I said she was wrong, because she had never said so before. I wanted to be the only Indian around.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of the book were inventive and the intentions matched the execution on the page, yet other parts seemed unfocused and somewhat redundant. I think it was a mistake to use so much material from the college years and rely on footnotes to fill in the gaps. I get what she was going for stylistically, but I'm not convinced the final draft pulled it off.

[Liana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disjointed writing that tended to ramble with a whiny tone. Found myself surprisingly bored with this book.

[francesca · Rating 5 out of 5]

guys this was so good but it triggered me so bad i don’t know if i can recommend it 😭 i was not aware this was going to be so graphic … but it was amazing

[Queralt✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

"He told me I was going to remember him forever because he was my first. See how right he was?"

This memoir is a raw and unflinching exploration of identity and the societal violation that comes with being born a woman and being Native American. Women are defined by rules that are imposed on us and contradict each other. The rules come from: women's magazines (does he like you? How to give the best blowjobs!), Catholic school (virgins are praised), tragic romance novels (sexualized virgins), erotic novels, weight loss magazines, TV, men's opinions, warnings (don't go out at night if you're a woman, cuz the warning will never tell men not to rape or what consent looks like), etc. News flash, you can't be experienced in everything sex if you're also a virgin.

Washuta speaks about how she is defined by this, sexual violence, mental health diagnoses, and her forever-changing medical prescriptions.

This was a lot. A lot, a lot. I obviously cannot empathize with ethnic issues nor bipolar hypersexualization (my asexual ass was confused lol), but everything else? 100%.

Content warnings for sexual violence, self-blame, victim blaming, anorexia, depression, racism, etc.

"Are those my ribs? I thought that was fat. That used to be fat. That’s not fat. I do have a very large ribcage. Do I have a problem? Should I be talking to someone? Am I unattractively skinny?"

[Sumayyah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part personal diary, part research paper/dissertation, and part sexual assault survivor affirmation, "My Body Is A Book Of Rules" by Elissa Washuta is a harrowing and important book. In it, Washuta describes, often in great detail, her struggles with bipolar disorder, her assaults, her disordered eating, her battles with her identity racial and ethnic identity. There was parts I wanted to highlight, underline, and tattoo on my skin. There were parts that made me cringe and withdraw. There were parts that I related so closely to that I breathed a sigh of relief that we both survived. Massive trigger warning for descriptions of rape, assault, disordered eating, and suicidal ideation, among other things. Again, this both is both harrowing and important; in my opinion, it will be appreciated by people unable (or willing) to be as open with their struggles as Washuta has been. I applaud Elissa Washuta for penning the story of her early life, and thank her for sharing it with us.

[Cathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. So many ways to describe this book: clever, full of pain, snarky, disturbing, tragic, illuminating, brilliant, overexposed, and unlike anything I've ever read before. Elissa Washuta bares all with an intensity that might make some cringe, but she does so with such honesty that you can't help but feel empathy for anyone suffering mental illness and to feel that more stories like this might further help not merely to bring awareness but also to allow us inside the brilliant and tortured mind of one like Washuta's. This book will haunt me for a long time.

[Anthony Friscia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really 3.5 stars. Read as a possible “mental health” Common Experience book. A memoir as a series of essays. The author is Native American, 1/32 as she says many times, and that’s about how much that plays into the stories she tells. Mostly it’s about her struggles with bipolar disorder and processing the rape she experienced. Some essays are just long annotated lists - all the prescription drugs she’s tried to treat her mental health, all the men she has had sex with. One essay is an annotated online chat where she talks to her friend about the sexual assault. At times witty with interesting forms to her writing, often repetitive.

[Lara Lillibridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This strong and vibrant collection experiments with form as it examines what it is to be native American, to be female, to have mental illness, to have survived rape. Washuta probes and interrogates each subject from a variety of angles, each deepening our understanding of the narrator.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though this book is only 200 pages, it feels much bigger. Well, actually it is. The physical size of it is bigger than normal and it's still bursting everywhere. Elissa excavates her life, from a happy childhood to her more emotionally fraught and disrupted college years. It's intense but also really funny at times, as she pulls back the curtain on her sex life, her body image, her "indian-ness," and her bipolar anxiety. It can feel a little messy at times but that's real life. Don't be scared. It's thrilling.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

poignant & provocative

reminiscent of ‘Her Body and Other Parties’
(Elissa Washuta 🤝 Carmen Maria Machado), down to the reimagined law & order: svu chapter

[Karen Finneyfrock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elissa Washuta walks into the painful questions surrounding sexual assault, hangs out and has interesting conversations about each piece of furniture. The language is fantastic, the structure is inventive. I never felt bored while reading this book which managed to put a new lens on the experience of having a body and a brain with each new chapter. Smart, skillful writing.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really emotional and challenging read but worth it every second. Elissa Washuta is an expert at mixed prose. I felt like I was inside my own head sometimes.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a hard read at times, both difficult subject matter and taxing at times how Washuta talks about herself. I think the writing is cyclical intentionally and appreciated the playing with style, but some essays felt very over-long, like the academic paper on usage of the phrase 'hooking up' by Washuta's interviewed friends and the extensive essay composed of Law and Order SVU quotes. As a memoir in essays, this was introspective but in a way that felt sometimes unfinished.

Cw for rape, eating disorder, alcohol and drug use, suicide, fatphobia

[emmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think should be required reading for all men i interact with on a regular basis and i hope an anvil falls on the guy that i dated for 2 months last spring

[Patricia Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy hell. My cw prof loaned this to me. Felt so seen by it.

Washuta illuminates the holy trinity of mental breakdowns, sexual trauma, and eating disorders (with a side of substance abuse) in a way I’ve never encountered before. (My friend: “They always seem to go together, don’t they.”) Grappling with her understanding of her Native American heritage further complicates her search for a coherent identity.

Her writing is piercingly lucid, unsentimental, and unflinching. It can be harsh. At the same time, her experimental style brings in a bit of levity, creating space for playfulness and joy in her craft.

Still, this relatively short book took me forever to read, maybe because I kept taking naps after touching it (digesting?). It’s difficult. Basically every page is a trigger warning. And I wish we could have seen Washuta find her way to greater redemption. This seems to be nascent in the final pages, but in the end healing remains more burgeoning promise than fully-realized resolution.

This narrative feels both deeply personal and damningly universal. I think any person who has made the transition from girl to woman (or gone through adolescence generally) will see themselves in bits of this.

Here are some highlights:

Putting words to fear of the self:
“Watch your moods. Don’t let people see you fluctuate. Don’t let yourself run your mouth. Never ever cry, even alone, because your cat or your kettle might tell. Always smile, but don’t laugh loudly. Mania is an extrovert, but if you need to vent, tell your mattress or maybe your therapist, but put nothing in writing and never tell a friend or coworker how you’re really feeling. Downplay any problem or joy. Pay attention to any signs that your life is shitty or excellent, because either is an illusion. Be careful around men, especially ones with big arms or opinions. Stop talking” (138).

And to the sense of sadness which can arise in recovery:
“Giving up the insanity hurts, feels like killing a part of my brain. Sometimes I think about the old, bad things and try to feel the pain again, try to cry. I watch movies and final episodes of TV shows that I know will bring on the tears, just so I’ll cry. I remember those fierce days, those times I screamed into the carpet with my mouth open as wide as it would go, or the times my tingling forehead felt like it was about to detach and float up into the night sky. I have beaten my brain like a bad dog. It now submits. I now feel happy when something good happens, and sad when things aren’t so good. I only cry when I’m hurt or scared, like my parents taught me. Every emotion has a reason and a source. Still, I miss those frightening times, those ugly moods, that mix of irrational up and devastating low. I miss them because they were mine” (148).

I’d never before seen these feelings represented on the page.

And I felt this final desire deeply, though I don’t have the words to explain why:

“I don’t want small changes: I want to turn half-creature and breathe through gills, replace my human brain with something that needs only to know smell and light and balance, an understanding of pain without nuance and shade” (189).

[Karen Mcswain · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, but her writing annoyed me. I felt like I was reading somebody's poorly written diary. I did enjoy the SVU chapter. Also, the cover art and the title are great.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a very intense read because it contains multiple descriptions of sexual violence and the story revolves around the aftermath of these incidents as well as with self-described bipolar disorder, experiences of self-injury, binge drinking, and disordered eating/body image. It also deals with inner conflict around understanding/embracing/being alienated from Indigenous identity (Washuta has Cowlitz and Cascade ancestry but little lived connection to these cultures).

I also have to preface this review by saying that a) I'm a psychiatric survivor and b) I wrote an entire PhD dissertation examining women writing about their experiences of madness/mental distress/mental illness, so it's hard for me to read any madness memoir without my own particular academic and personal gazes.

Perhaps appropriate to a book about rapidly cycling moods, I had vacillating love/hate feelings about this book. Despite its short length, at times it was a slog I didn't want to finish, and at others I was completely engrossed. It was raw and howling--by turns beautiful and disturbing.

In the tradition of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Washuta's memoir is a pastiche of different documents and styles, but with more formal innovation and play than Kaysen's, in that all her documents are made up, including a fake letter from Washuta's psychiatrist written in a tongue-in-cheek style, an annotated bibliography of books that were influential on Washuta (but most of which she didn't finish due to inability to focus), a Match.com dating profile, tabloid reports of an unhinged Britney Spears, an examination of her own culpability (or not) in regards to her sexual assaults, done in the style of Law and Order: SVU (Washuta's a big fan), imagined encounters with her idol Kurt Cobain, and a fake academic paper. Footnotes are used throughout the text to add layers - there's so many it's actually kind of obnoxious, but it does create a kind of disorganization that, along with the non-linearity of the narrative, forces us to experience some of the brain-scramble that Washuta is trying to capture. Maybe that's part of what made this book hard for me to read: it forced me to revisit a lot of my own crazy times. It was also really boring at times. It was hard not to feel pretty fucked up after reading this book.

As a psychiatric survivor, and a sexual assault survivor, born the same year as Washuta, given the same diagnosis, many of her experiences resonated with me very much, despite us being different in many ways. Some of this was very validating for me, especially her post-mortems of her sexual assaults in the style of Law and Order: SVU, which helped me to think through my own experiences in a new way.

While much resonated, one of several ways my story differs from Washuta's is that I no longer subscribe to the medical model of mental illness and stopped looking to psychiatrists and medication to explain/fix my brain a long time ago. That's not to say that I'm right and Washuta is wrong--Washuta should do whatever she feels she needs to do and use whatever narratives work for her, and after all we're different people--but I tend not to totally buy the idea that "my family was really normal and nice and I had a great childhood but my brain is just broken," which she asserts strongly at least once in the narrative. For me, personally, this has ultimately been a dis-empowering narrative, and I find it difficult to accept other people taking it on seemingly uncritically. In this particular story, the "just broken" explanation seems at odds with her portrayal of inter-generational trauma and violence (such as that experienced by her Cascade ancestors, and that opens the book) which we know affects people on a genetic level, and the systemic racism Washuta herself describes growing up with (people making generalized assumptions about her based on her Indianness, the cultural violence of blood quantum etc.) Then again, in her inclusion of these events, maybe Washuta is trying to connect this trauma with biological illness. As I've said, I don't want to re-narrate Washuta's experiences, because she's obviously more than capable of telling her own story, I'm just trying to be transparent about how I am reading the story through my own experiences and rejection of the medical model.

I've actually changed my rating from three stars to four, because regardless of the things that didn't resonate for me personally--or resonated too hard--the book's not about me, and Washuta deftly and innovatively portrays experiences of mental distress in this haunting memoir. It wouldn't have been so affecting if it hadn't also felt so real.

[Kurt Kemmerer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Parts of this human, humane, heart wrenching, hopeful book proved to be absolutely brilliant to my mind. Some parts missed a bit, but the risks were worth taking. I’m less enchanted by the structure than others, but that may be because I read the book a few years too late, and this kind of this and that structure has lost its novelty for me, but nonetheless, you should read this book.

Also, bluntly, all mental health providers should read this book. It is one of the better times of this type, and the insightful reminders are worthy.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not boring! That is the most important quality in a book - for me, these days. I'm glad I bought it rather than checking it out from the library. I liked the experimentation with form. The events in the book made me glad not to be in college or in my early 20s anymore.

[Krista Robbins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly enjoyed the disjointed, nonlinear approach to this memoir. So much of the story was in the footnotes which allowed me to feel like I was getting a deep look into Elissa’s perspective. Each chapter felt new to me and I could have read several more essays from Elissa. Will be adding it to my list of memoirs I recommend to my psychology students.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

The variety of form that appeared in this collection was delightful, likely born out of a frustration of finding ways to describe what is indescribable. For example, one of the "essays" occurred entirely in the footnotes of the author's online dating profile. As a survivor myself, I found myself surviving again, reconstructing myself again, alongside her. What a book.

[Potassium · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I love how smart and creative these essays are. Elissa Washuta is writing goals for sure. Yay mixies.

[Disco Reimann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The benchmark for a great memoir: the dismay I only get to read it for the first time once. I lived in her words for several days and exited it with a more thoughtful, healed heart. She writes from the intersection of her bipolar, her sexual trauma, and her indigenous identity to produce a raw version of a "how to survive" guide, detailing what it's like to live in a cycle of trauma that feels so chemical, physical, and spiritual--but mostly so human.

A second benchmark: a book that pulls out the writer in the reader. I hadn't written creatively in a while, but seeing her "fuck-the-form" style felt like such a helpful invitation to write in ways I wouldn't have thought of before. My favorites were her Bibliography of books that trace her depressive tendencies and the list of penetrative partners.

A third benchmark: wanting to thank the writer for writing.

"It’s a good thing that growing up means growing out of your old self, old body. Like a cicada’s brittle brown shell. When you molt, there’s green underneath, iridescent, so brilliant it’s like you’ll never turn hard and dark again."