I'M TELLING THE TRUTH BUT I'M LYING is a collection of essays detailing author and poet Bassey Ikpi's experiences with bipolar II, ranging from her childhood in Nigeria to her young adulthood traveling with HBO's Def Poetry Jam.

To be fully honest, I was not at all familiar with Ikpi's spoken word work before reading this book, and still I found myself completely gripped by her story and her storytelling. Ikpi brings the tangle of emotions brought on by anxiety, depression, and mania to vivid life on the page. I don't think I've ever seen an author articulate that feeling of getting a diagnosis and experiencing total confusion because you thought that was just a weird personality quirk you had.

Ikpi's writing is intense and immediate. She doesn't shy away from showing the reader how much she struggled not only to understand and accept her diagnosis, but also how hard it was to adequately treat it - the essay that details the long trials of tweaking medications and dosages is one of the most harrowing things I've read lately.