Madness: A Bipolar Life - Softcover

An astonishing dispatch from inside the belly of bipolar disorder, reflecting major new insights

When Marya Hornbacher published her first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet have the piece of shattering knowledge that would finally make sense of the chaos of her life. At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type I rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disorder.

In Madness, in her trademark wry and utterly self-revealing voice, Hornbacher tells her new story. Through scenes of astonishing visceral and emotional power, she takes us inside her own desperate attempts to counteract violently careening mood swings by self-starvation, substance abuse, numbing sex, and self-mutilation. How Hornbacher fights her way up from a madness that all but destroys her, and what it is like to live in a difficult and sometimes beautiful life and marriage -- where bipolar always beckons -- is at the center of this brave and heart-stopping memoir.

Madness delivers the revelation that Hornbacher is not alone: millions of people in America today are struggling with a variety of disorders that may disguise their bipolar disease. And Hornbacher's fiercely self-aware portrait of her own bipolar as early as age four will powerfully change, too, the current debate on whether bipolar in children actually exists.

Ten years after Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, this storm of a memoir will revolutionize our understanding of bipolar disorder.

"Hornbacher is a virtuoso writer." - New York Times When Marya Hornbacher published a nationally bestselling memoir of her battle with anorexia and bulimia she had no idea that there was a piece of shattering knowledge that wouold finally make sense of the chaos of her life. Her struggles with mental illness, and the story she would have to tell about them, were far from over. At twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type I rapid-cycle bipolar disorder, the most severe form. In Madness, she details her fight back from the disease that nearly destroyed her. Tracing the history of her illness, she shows how bipolar can spawn a number of other conditions, including eating disorders, substance abuse, promiscuity, and self-mutilation. Like Hornbacher, many of us suffer from these never knowing that they are related to bipolar, that there is a larger cause for our particular pain. Now, in this brave, heart-stopping, beautifully written memoir Marya Hornbacher offers a challenge to the perception of bipolar in America. Madness is an incredible portrait of a difficult, sometimes beautiful life. "With the same intimately revelatory and shocking emotional power that marked [Wasted], Hornbacher guides us through her labyrinth of psychological demons."  --Elle

"Hooks readers from the start .... [as Hornbacher] whips around this rollercoaster ride, her unflinching style keeps us firmly seated beside her." --USA Today  Marya Hornbacher is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated national bestseller Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, a book that remains an intensely read classic, and the acclaimed novel The Center of Winter. An award-winning journalist, she lectures nationally on writing and mental health and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.