When the novelist William Styron wrote a piece for Vanity Fair in 1989 describing his battle with depression, he could hardly have known that he was pioneering a new genre. He expanded the essay into a book, Darkness Visible, the first modern example of a now burgeoning literary form, the depression memoir. Styron’s candour helped to break down some of the stigma around the condition, and in the 25 years since it was published, such personal memoirs have become almost commonplace, particularly among writers and journalists (myself included). The fact that so many personal accounts continue to be published is testament to the way these stories have made it easier to discuss an illness that is still too often regarded as shameful or somehow less than valid.
Jay Griffiths is an impossible writer to categorise; her books are part cultural histories, part travelogues, exploring such abstract concepts as time, wildness and childhood. Her remarkable 2007 book, Wild, begins with a description of how drinking ayahuasca with a Peruvian shaman drew her out of a persistent bout of depression.
In Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression, the illness returns, but this time there is no shaman to help. Griffiths spirals, via a series of apparently inconsequential events, into a vivid and dangerous mania that lasts a year and takes her to the brink of suicide. What she offers in this account is not a diary in any strict chronological sense, but rather a glimpse of madness from inside the eye of the storm.
“Why write about that terrible year?” a friend of mine asked me recently. “How can you want to revisit it?”
“Because manic depression seems to me a misunderstood condition,” Griffiths concludes, “and I want to describe it for those who have never experienced it but who perhaps know someone with it.” She continues, “If this book can befriend just one person in that terrifying loneliness, it will be worth writing.”
This, in the end, is the main reason any of us attempt to express our experience in words. For Griffiths, a profoundly poetic writer, her “tristimania” (the 18th-century word she prefers to capture the precise combination of mania and melancholy in a mixed-state bipolar episode) is a condition steeped in metaphorical significance. “Metaphor was becoming more true, if not more actual, than reality,” she writes. From this realm of symbolism she tries to convey both the terror and the seductive glitter of a manic episode, largely through the imagery of the god Mercury, totem of this most mercurial condition, and his literary incarnations.
For an illness of extremes, she seeks an extreme cure: walking the Camino de Santiago alone. Griffiths always writes so vividly about her travels that I wished this section of the book had been more detailed, but she is honest about the reason for her omissions: “I can’t tell you much about the Camino itself: I hardly remember much of the actuality of it.” It is “an ordeal”, she writes, “studded with poems and lit with little kindnesses like candles on the way”.
The book’s final section contains the poems she wrote from the heart of her darkness, and they strike the reader like a punch to the throat; here is all the rawness of psychic pain, torn out and laid bare. For such an intimate book, Tristimania often feels oddly oblique, except in these poems. But Griffiths returns from her pilgrimage with a cautious optimism, “a sense of coming up into daylight, small but alive”.
Bryony Gordon’s second volume of memoir, Mad Girl: A Happy Life With a Mixed-up Mind, is as robustly unsparing as her first, The Wrong Knickers. While she covers some of the same ground – her wild 20s, lost in cocaine binges and bad relationships – she goes into greater detail about the underlying reasons for her behaviour: a history of OCD beginning suddenly at the age of 12 and leaving a legacy of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and addiction.
Mad Girl is aimed squarely at the Girls generation; Gordon has set herself a challenge in choosing to write about often painful experience in her usual jaunty columnist’s prose and occasionally she seems concerned about losing her readers if she dwells on the darker moments. She needn’t worry; the book is at its best when she does strike a more serious note, particularly when she broadens her perspective, as she does in the prologue, to become impassioned about the state of mental health care in Britain. She, too, eventually finds solace in walking, using social media to start a walking group where like-minded people can share their experiences and help one another to recovery.
Both these books, with their appeal to very different readerships, will become part of the necessary and continuing conversation around mental illness; both, most importantly, offer readers the possibility of hope.
Tristimania is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £12.99. Mad Girl is published by Headline (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99
