This story about a woman with an undiagnosable mental illness from 17, life chronicled in mostly vignettes, was really emotionally effective at times. I know people who have had both physical illness and mental ones in similar situations and the liminal space of their personhood being defined by symptoms from such a time that they don’t feel they know who they actually are feels like something stories don’t touch on often, without devolving into complete melodramatic hysterics and shock value violence. Very pleased this didn’t go in that direction.

Mostly, actually, it’s far more of a quiet book than I anticipated. The arc is present, though it does meander too much, in my opinion, off the start and a bit in the middle. It’s simply the most stand-out memories. Mostly her attempts at dealing with Illness leading up to a present day altercation and post event. Some reveals sprinkled throughout and an unwavering solipsism to make the reader dwell solely in the events from her, Martha’s, perspective. I empathized with this because my own brain tends to hyper focus on the worst moments and not the best.

There are a few issue with it, for me, though. There is a meta component that adds absolutely nothing to the story and complicates the rep for mental illness. It insinuates that this is something like auto fiction, which takes the element of the unmanned illness into a real world context, despite it stating overtly that the symptoms of such an illness do not exist. That’s fine, because it’s fiction. Until, suddenly, she’s a writer and a memoirist… like the author, and things become blurry. Then, with that context, it also throws the ending into a weird space where it becomes fairly prescriptive, which I hate. Telegraphing a really blatant message to the reader with a very visible and garish bow on top. It’s both messy throughout, and then, suddenly, all but perfect. Also it doesn’t always know when it’s being interesting, and so has a bit of middle book syndrome where I was checking my progress.

That said, the people looking for an emotional story will find it here, as mentioned. It is laugh-out-loud funny, particularly at the start. Martha’s personality bleeds through because of the heavy handed solipsism, and I think it’s a testament to the character work that that point of view kept me reading throughout, as that is a pejorative I sling at books that 95% of the time can’t pull it off. The conceit is handled so well that it becomes the point, which I liked very much. And, annoyingly, I actually think the messaging was good -before- the prescriptive little bow was starting to be grafted to the text. It would have been much more powerful if the story was allowed to simply speak for itself.