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| Madness: A Bipolar Life | 
| Author: Marya Hornbacher
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $12.50
You Save: $12.50 (50%)
New (38) Collectible (1) from $12.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  38 reviews
Sales Rank: 7183
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 299
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0618754458
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.8950092
EAN: 9780618754458
ASIN: 0618754458
Publication Date: April 9, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Living my hell through her hell May 12, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I have some addiction issues with Klonopin and I started reading this book when I was going through some serious Klonopin withdrawal. I am not bipolar but I found this book helpful and comforting while going through my own personal madness.
Like she says in the book, I honestly don't know how she made it through all this without killing someone (by mistake of course) or herself, accidental or intentional. It is a miracle and she is blessed to come through this. Her writing is so convincing. I really felt like I was in her head and this is how it feels to be bipolar.
I don't know how she drank as much as she did!! I kept thinking, Wow, considering her situation she was able to travel for her book tour and become an accomplished woman.
I hope she stays on the straight and narrow and am glad that she told her story. I feel like anyone who reads this will finally understand what it is to have mental illness. Because so many people don't understand and I know I have a very hard time explaining how I feel sometimes.
An insight for those who don't quite understand May 7, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I cried reading this book. While I have been diagnosed with Bipolar II, where the mania is not so severe, but the depression is, I got to see myself from the outside. Marya's pictures in to the life and mind is extrodinary.
My husband is reading this after hearing an interview with her on the Dianne Rhem show on NPR. He said he finally knows me better than he ever has. The book is frightening, but at the same time hopeful.
A must-read for anyone who wants to see mental illness from the inside
Can't put it down! May 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a brilliant follow-up to Wasted. I've been reading it for less than a day and I am nearly halfway through. It's a tragedy that this book will end...
 Interesting but needs work May 4, 2008
3 out of 12 found this review helpful
I'm a clinical social worker. As a professional I found Marya's story very compelling. I do think, however, that the writing was only fair and the book could have been edited down some (especially the sections of her hospitalizations....too much to read...too repetitive). And at times it seemed a bit chaotic and disjointed. But I think it's worth reading.
in the troubled mind May 4, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I liked Marya's memoir. I have read a number of biographys/memoirs of people with mental illness and what I found most unique and original about Marya's is that she really puts you IN the bipolar mind. So much so that you are taken on the ride with her, more so than is generally the case. In doing this, she has to sacrifice some clarity and details. I'm guessing she does this to make the experience more real but also because many of her experiences occurred when she was either very off balance or both off balance and drunk... so in those cases, it would be harder for her to get all the details objectively clear anyway... so rather than focus on those details or presenting those details absolutely perfectly, she seems to have decided to put you in that 'confused space' with her, so that you can really feel what she was feeling... this to me was the best part, the greatest achievement, of what Marya has created here for her readers. It is possible that some may find this jarring for the first 100 or more pages...but the final 100 pages do give more overall perspective, if that is something you are concerned about.
Of course, being very interested, I wanted to know more, I wanted, at times, more objectivity, more details about her life, about the people around her (friends and family, etc), about the process by which she learned to write so well and do other things so well, including the magazine work. But I think she kept to a very clear purpose here. And that seemed to be, I think, to give the reader a very real honest, straightforward sense of what the bipolar mind is, how it thinks, how it hears and unnderstands and interprets, etc.... she achieved this very well...
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