While recently browsing in a bookstore, I came across an odd book called Thanks For the Memories, Now I’m Free. The author claims that as a child she was ritually abused by Henry Kissenger and Bob Hope, used as a sex slave of presidents and a personal “mind file” computer (whatever the heck that means) and so forth. A single paragraph of the book makes it clear that the author is mentally ill; the book is some 200 pages long…
Every couple of years I run across books like this, and am at a loss to explain how they reach the market (in this case, a bookstore as far away as Kyiv, Ukraine). Nearly all are self-published. Do self-publishing firms care so much about profit that they enable those will mental instability to squander their money? And how well do books of this sort sell? The back of the book has a number of blurbs, and the Amazon.com listing has numerous positive reviews (although it looks like many are from the same person.
So, though it’s a strange topic for Cafe Society, but what other books of this sort are out there? (Perhaps this belongs in IMHO, in which case feel free to move it).
Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one good example of an author who was diagnosed as mentally ill later going on to produce a signifigant, meaningful work.
Mervyn Peake, who wrote Gormenghast . Very unsettling and evocative, and you can feel his fingerholds on reality slipping as you read. But a great trilogy.
In doing research for a paper in college (please don’t press me for too many details, this was fifteen years ago), I discovered that a great many scholars seem to take it for granted that Twain started off a little unstable but was practically certifiable by the time he died. My research focused on Connecticut Yankee, and I read a lot about how the scenes of violence in that book were examples of how dissociated human empathy he had become, almost suggesting a sociopathic disorder.
Two of the most heartwrenching, laugh-out-loud books I’ve read in the last few years are Slackjaw and Quiting the Nairoibi Trio by Jim Knipfel. Both deal with his diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor, his supsequent blindness, mental breakdown and becomming institutionalized. But not in a “Oh, poor me, pity me” way. More in an angry, “this sucks, but it sure is funny” vein.
He has another, The Buzzing, coming out this spring, a first foray into fiction, other than that, I don’t know much about it.
There’s a book called When Rabbit Howls, written by “the troops of Truddi Chase.” Ms. Chase is a woman diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder who allegedly has 60+ personalities.
“Self-published” often means that the author pays a sum of money to a company that prints and assembles the book. That’s all. No editing, no distribution, no relationship. They are making copies. If I go into Kinko’s and pay for 100 copied of my manuscript to be printed and bound. Kinko’s neither reads it nor asks whether I’m squandering my money.
Leaves of Grass was self-published. At the time, homosexuality was generally acknowledged to be highly immoral. Should Whitman have been stopped from self-publishing because his moral status was questionnable?
This is the book (Quitting the Narobi Trio specifically) I thought of when I saw the thread title. Amazing book. I’m looking foward to reading his fiction. Have you read any of his NYPress colmns?
But I think Unu is talking not so much about authors who have- or have had- mental illnesses but authours who write out of the depths of their mental illness.
Like for example Alfered Godbout, who used to come into the B&N I worked at to check up on the sales of his books “I Was Aboard a UFO” and the other one- I can’t remember the name, but it was about the things the snow on his television told him. No really. It came with pictures of the television.
Yes, his books were self published. The question is, are the publishing firms exploiting the mentally ill by taking their money and publishing these thing? I don’t think so. I think the mentally ill have just as much right to distribute their weird ideas as the technically sane. So I don’t see them as any more expoited than anyone else who pays to publish.
Reading Mr. Godbout’s books, they seem to be the product of some extremely disorganised thinking. And yet, he managed to get them to the publisher, see them produced, and monitor their sales. Maybe this is good for him?
As far as sales go, I don’t think any have been sold to anyone but him.
I seem to recall that the death of Twain’s daughter had a lot to do with the increasingly dark mood of “Connecticut Yankee.” Also, Twain seemed to have developed an obsession with Joan of Arc in his later days, possibly by way of morbid conflation with his deceased daughter, and published some work on this theme. Whether he was certifiable, I can’t say.
There are any number of “vanity presses” which will print any number of books written by whoever, in any form or edition that person likes.
All you have to do is pay for it. You also distribute the books yourself. If you get rich or hit it big, the press has no hold on you.
I wouldn’t call this “exploitation of the mentally ill.” Admittedly, they are taking advantage of people who really, really wanna get published in the worst way, and couldn’t make it happen with a real publisher… but I don’t think I’d call it “exploitation” so much as “making available a service.”
Does a grocery store exploit me by taking my money in exchange for food?
I worked alongside Jim one day at NY Press (which is where I first encountered Cecil Adams). He was the receptionist and was going on vacation, so I filled in for him. I encountered him probably a dozen or more times and found him to be a truly lovable misanthrope. And his Slackjaw column is not to be missed.
Patty Duke is bi-polar and wrote a book about it a few years back. It seems to me that it had the name “Anna” in the title. Maybe someone here knows what I’m talking about.
Zelda Fitzgerald was not only married to a famous writer, she wrote herself and eventually became very seriously mentally ill.
Oops! I almost forgot. One of the most famous authors who suffered from mental illness is William Styron, the author of Sophie’s Choice. He wrote a book about the experience. It is called Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.
