Comments on: Book Review of Madness: A Bipolar Life

By: Melissa Miles McCarter

Melissa Miles McCarter — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:06:25 +0000

Hi, I recently wrote a memoir about my early experiences right before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and it is somewhat similar to the Madness book, but I focus on a shorter amount of time and go into detail about the intense experience prior to knowing how to name it with a diagnosis. It is called Insanity: A Love Story and can be found at Amazon.com or via the link

By: Cecie

Cecie — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:01:23 +0000

In her latest book, Madness: A Bipolar Life, Marya Hornbacher is surprisingly able to describe in amazing detail almost her entire life despite frequent lapses into abysmal depression opposed to periods of over-achiever super success, which would invariably spiral upward into full-blown psychotic manias.

Anyone familiar with bipolar illness will recognize the repeated roller-coaster cycling and the difficulty in finding and maintaining a stabilizing medicine combination.

Madness is difficult to put down. As you turn the pages to find that one day she is a successful, wealthy, on-top-of-the-world, happily married editor, and the next a miserable, shuffling, robe-wearing, stringy-haired patient in a mental institution with little or no grasp of reality… though, all the while, you know she is very real. You can never doubt the authenticity of the person behind the sometimes audacious and sometimes pitiful behavior.

Somehow, through all of it, she hangs onto a thread, and with that thread, she is able to weave an incredible life. In Madness Marya retrieves it all well enough to share her story with the world.

I, for one, am grateful that she did.

By: KJ

KJ — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 01:12:18 +0000

that was the first book about bipolar disorder that I read and boy is it a doozey!
Marya swept me along with her long frantic sentences and then I crashed into her short phrases when her depression got the better of her.
I was moved how she was so open and put down so many facts. I hope she is ok now!

I am now reading Electroboy. Good thing they didn’t meet! lol