About this book
What happens when someone you love suddenly cliff-dives into mental illness? And then you discover that there may be no return?
This experimental memoir reflects on the author's intimate and complicated relationship with a woman diagnosed with suicidal depression, and the startling and chaotic new world of locked wards, heavy medications, and electroconvulsive therapy that follows.
Interweaving personal essays, fragmented prose, poetry, stream-of-consciousness, and text exchanges, this collage-style book invites the reader into the mysterious world of a treatment-resistant condition and illuminates the urgency and intimacy of caring for someone with an ultimately fatal mental illness. Running through the center of the narrative is the relationship between two people whose fierce love for each other is both the tie that binds and the anchor that drowns.
Lifeline is a testament to the importance of hard conversations, humor, and dignity in the face of a courageous battle for sanity; an interrogation of the flaws in the medical system; a debate on when life stops being worth living; and a conversation and reflection on what it means to love someone enough to go on without them.
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Information
Table of contents
- Epigraph
- “Hey, doll …”
- Rewind
- Empaths Anonymous
- Come in. Stay.
- Or Maybe It Wasn’t
- Zoom Therapy, Day One
- Show Me Your ACEs
- If You’re Searching for Causes …
- To Do:
- Shirley MacLaine Is a Verb
- Soulmates
- Build Me an Attic
- Swallow It
- Suicide Song
- Twelve Days on the Psych Ward
- Healing …
- Last Day
- The Acrobats in My Head
- Eight Things I’m Putting in Your Care Package
- All Things Can Be True
- Thirty-Two Days in Purgatory
- Hope Acres
- Last Call
- Day Thirty-Two
- “But I was late …”
- Superheroes Don’t Die Like This
- Elegy for a Warrior Queen
- Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning
- No, I Don’t Want a Friend
- No. Nobody Else.
- Shine On
- “Steph …”
- About the Author
- Copyright
