Just like physical illness, mental illness has, in one way or another, affected almost every family I know. Attempting to map its vicious and debilitating extremes in an honest way seems to me both a brave and a useful exercise. We need to hear about these things and understand them better. I began Emma Forrest's memoir about her descent into depression and mania with what I hope was a wholly sympathetic heart.
As a writer, Forrest – who has been publishing articles since her teens – knows what she's doing. Her prose is smart and frequently witty and there are echoes of early Lorrie Moore in her ability to lampoon the precise detail that tells you all you need to know about a character or situation. And, though it would be unfair to assume that this book came easily to her, still it dances along with all the lyrical panache of a novel.
Indeed, there's a fairytale element to this tale of a bright and attractive 22-year-old from a loving, if eccentric, family who, on contract to the Guardian and with a first novel about to come out, moves to Manhattan to write. Many would envy her, so it's perhaps not surprising that for some time she keeps her real life (and self) secret. Lonely, bulimic and increasingly self-destructive, she binges, purges and cuts herself with razors, while embarking on a series of casual and abusive sexual relationships.
Finally, having reached the point where "sex didn't register unless it hurt", she finds herself in a hospital emergency ward and from there manages to get herself to Dr R, a likeably down-to-earth psychiatrist. Ultimately, with his help, she turns herself around. But that's not until she's made a serious suicide attempt, come home and done a spell in the Priory, and spent several more years in damaging relationships, all of it made more disorientating by the fact that Dr R dies suddenly of lung cancer without any of his patients knowing he was ill.
Unsurprisingly, this death – the shock of it, and the inevitable sense of having been abandoned – looms large for Forrest. And at first I was on her side. Though distraught, she seems to grasp the fact that the psychiatrist's death is principally a tragedy for him, his wife and two young children. But a hundred or so pages on – having now even quizzed his dignified widow over lunch – she is still asking questions like "why, why, why didn't he give me any warning?" This is when I began to lose patience. As a portrait of manic self-obsession, Forrest's memoir is frank and acute. But does she realise this is what she's written?
Maybe it's precisely this self-obsession that lies at the heart of her illness, but it is hard to read on without a bad taste in the mouth. What are we to make of her constant need to have men – and especially famous men – desire her, and then hurry off to catalogue it all in a tone that's a little too close to crowing for comfort?
Writing screenplays now and moving from New York to Beverly Hills, the opportunities are rife. There's the on-off flirtation with the "award-winning" writer. And the playwright whose "talent looms over anyone our age who wants to be a writer", who asks if she thinks they'll ever sleep together. Or the "movie star with a storied reputation" who spends a year telling her he wants her to have his babies, only to dump her apparently without warning. (Incidentally, although the movie star remains unnamed, two clicks of a mouse will tell you that he was at this time already the father of a young child by someone else – surely a crucial fact which Forrest must have known but, bafflingly, omits to mention.)
By now, though, I no longer knew who to believe or what to think. So Forrest had her heart broken by an actor famous for his womanising behaviour? But is it also possible that she wasn't the most stable of companions? When she tells us how she stalked him for weeks afterwards, sending him "bizarre and random" notes about what she was having for dinner, you can't help feeling a flicker of sympathy for him. He answers her emails coolly and doesn't respond to her texts. She seems surprised. I'm not.
Dr R had suggested Forrest go to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, an idea she didn't heed. Who knows whether it would have helped but, as she moves on to new psychiatrists and (presumably) new men, you can't help hoping she'll find what she really needs: someone who'll see straight through her and not fall for her oh-so-plausible lines on everything. And then, chillingly, you worry that the very existence of this book will provide her with the one thing she needs like a hole in the head: an audience.
