in her kaleidoscopic essays, memoir has been shattered into sliding and overlapping pieces. In fact, Wang only occasionally deals with how the outside world sees her - instead, she is busy with understanding herself, mirroring her experience through words, and learning coping mechanisms that she knows won't heal her (there is no cure) but that may help her live as best she can.'Dazzling.
Unlike many narratives about illness, this is not one of miraculous recovery, sunny positivity, or a grin-and-bear-it mentality. But it is precisely because of these experiences, she explains, that she's "uncomfortably uncomfortable" around the visibly psychotic: "I know that these are my people in ways that those who have never experienced psychosis can't understand, and to shun them is to shun a large part of myself." This kind of honesty is bracing, and at times difficult to square with Wang's descriptions of her own psychotic episodes, audible and visual hallucinations, and perhaps scariest of all, the period of time she believed she was dead, or the stretches during which she believed those she loved had been replaced by false duplicates that didn't evoke any feelings in her. Wang is not immune to judgment, both directed at - and by - her. Starting with the science in "Diagnosis" and "Toward a Pathology of the Possessed," and ending with the spiritual and mystical (or at least a door left open for them) in "Chimayó" and "Beyond the Hedge," Wang provides a series of lenses through which to observe the schizophrenic disorders and, by extension, our (mis)understanding of them. In 13 tightly organized essays, The Collected Schizophrenias, winner of the 2016 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, reveals different aspects of Wang's diagnoses - schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type and late-stage Lyme disease - through simply-conveyed research, powerful metaphor, and personal experiences. Writers like Wang, however, give us a gift in their ability to convey the indescribable through language. One of the more frightening things about any painful experience that isn't outwardly obvious to the people around us - like some mental and physical illnesses or disabilities - is how difficult it is to communicate what it feels like to those around us. I like to know that I'm not pioneering an inexplicable condition."
"Some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them boxes and labels," writes Esmé Weijun Wang in the first essay of her new book, The Collected Schizophrenias." ut I've always found comfort in preexisting conditions. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Collected Schizophrenias Subtitle Essays Author Esmé Weijun Wang
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