Out of Me: Story of a Postnatal Breakdown

by Fiona Shaw

Out of Me is the compelling account of Fiona Shaw's hellish descent into post-natal depression. In a book which has drawn comparison with Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, she attempts to piece together her shattered identity in a testimony that is both intensely personal yet strangely objective.

The journey takes her back to a childhood where, peddled relentlessly to and fro between divided families, she was always the outsider. Increasingly driven into herself, she began to enact more and more obsessive cries for help. The most heart-rending episode tells of a feigned back pain that became a way of gaining her parents' attention. The weeks in hospital turn into months. She undergoes one test after another as the doctors try to determine the cause of her mysterious condition and finally, incredibly, spinal surgery. The terrifying clarity of her words transports you into the skewed world of a desperate child where the line between real and pretend becomes blurred. It is here we see the root of Shaw's terrifying ability to disassociate from herself and gain an insight into a bizarre psychic splitting process that can occur under extreme emotional stress. Perhaps, Shaw wonders, her breakdown came when it did because at last she was in a safe, loved enough place to allow it to happen. Out of Me explores themes of memory and identity, the fragile, fallible structures upon which we base our selves. It is a story of terrible, almost fatal despair but finally one of survival, reconstruction and understanding. --Rebecca Johnson

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 1997

About the author

Not to be confused with Fiona Shaw, the Irish-born stage & screen actress.

Fiona was born in London in 1964. Her place of birth is now a hospital broom cupboard and her first home was on a street later obliterated beneath a superstore off the Cromwell Rd. However, she passed most of her childhood as the eldest of three girls in a lovely and spacious family home near the Thames.

Fiona studied various literatures at the Universities of York and Sussex, finishing with a PhD on poet Elizabeth Bishop.

Since then, Fiona has written a memoir and four novels and done the habitual round of the novelist’s other jobs to help balance out her stubborn desire to write.

Fiona has worked as a Royal Literary Fund writing fellow at the University of York, 2007-2009, and is now working as RLF writing fellow in Sheffield University, attached to the Animal and Plant Sciences Department.

Living in York with her partner and two daughters, Fiona reads a great deal, cycles everywhere, grows vegetables with variable success and acquires more films than she ever gets around to watching. She is working on her fifth novel.

Reviews

[Ellie Breen]

Brutally honest, shocking and quite disturbing at parts. Shaw dissects her past: ECT, ‘baby blues,’ back pains and childhood trauma. I enjoyed this terribly. My only criticism was the mismatched structure that jumped around from one place to the next (although she holds herself accountable to this) and how she compared herself to Plath, saying she had it ‘worse’. But overall, a must read.

[Paul A.]

Backstory enhances understanding of the more detailed and more ……….

……..nuanced parts of her novel YADA YADA YADA YADA yadayaa YADA YADA YADA YADA yada YADA and so. Forth and