Your Voice in My Head [Paperback]

There's a reason many people who suffer from mental illness sometimes wish they'd been cursed instead with something more sympathetic like cancer. Bi-polar people hurt themselves and also tend to leave a trail of emotionally bruised and bloody loved ones. It is true crazy beautiful women are often romanticized but the truth is mental illness makes those afflicted feel misunderstood and isolated more than not. It's that sense of isolation which makes me reach for a first person account from anyone who suffers from a debilitating mental disorder.

Your Voice In My Head reads like fiction. It's fast paced, sometimes funny, sometimes sad but as a memoir about struggling with manic depression, it left me cold, frustrated and more than a little aggravated. If this is supposed to be a tribute to the psychiatrist who treated Forrest for a decade, it fails. Dr. R's care and influence is lost here to a sort of travelogue of the author's romances and a few oddly placed celebrity encounters and pop culture references. If it's supposed to be a story about the struggle of recovery, it feels hollow. I get how impossibly hard it is to put words to the feelings of being mentally ill and struggling to get better. I have a box of unsent letters written to try to explain the unexplainable. I get it.

Frustrating how much there is of how other people see her, what they say about how she appears to lovers, tabloids, anonymous people who say she's fat, a random actress who sees a connection where this isn't one anymore and even Dr. R's thoughts on her uniqueness rather than her illness.

Then there's Gypsy Husband. Details of Forrest's relationship with a "movie star" are sprinkled through the beginning of the book and lead to most of the last half being almost exclusively about him. A quick Google search identifies the movie star as Colin Farrell. The focus on Farrell as it compares to the telling of her relationship with Dr. R is unbalanced given the professed nature of the book, and frankly is exploitive in a way that made me feel uneasy. There are details shared which are deeply personal and unnecessary. Farrell sends her texts, silly but sweet presents, fantasizes with her about a baby girl named Pearl and then decides it's over for him, all within the span of what seems to be a few months. Nothing extraordinary here, no reason for a reader older than 13 to believe this was the lost love of a lifetime. Yet, in the book Farrell's effect is more significant than Dr. R who saved her life.

Looking for the good I find I was touched when she wrote briefly about the loss of Dr. R and GH foreshadowing the eventual loss of her charming and eccentric parents. She doesn't go very far there. I think that might be what went wrong. Maybe the focus on the heartbreak of losing Farrell was easier to explore than the much more difficult and painful loss of a doctor who presumably meant so much for so long and the difficulties of living with her illness. Like focusing on a paper cut so you don't notice your leg has been chopped off. That's possible, I guess. The idea of a devotional dedicated to her doctor and an exploration of her illness and survival is the promise I bought the book for. In a few passages she touches on heartbreaking truth and then like pulling a hand from a hot pot, she moves quickly to something safer, usually GH.

And then she's Cassandra, the woman in ancient mythology who is cursed with the ability to see the future and not be believed. She is Cassandra in the context of Farrell's future relationships.

"You will have to be Cassandra and know what lies ahead for that girl."

The line that says it all. Brilliant and wonderful if only what she knew that wasn't believed is how hard it is to be broken in this world.

I have bipolar type II - I'm drawn to books that deal with mental health and, more specifically, to those written about, or by, people with bipolar. So when a friend offered to lend me Your Voice in My Head I leapt at the chance.

At first glance the cover for Your Voice in My Head looks rather baffling and surreal. But it's an image that represents the high and lows of the author's illness beautifully. Emma Forrest has bipolar type I, where mania and depression cycle more extremely than in type II. The fluttering butterflies represent the brightness and creativity that mania can be at first as they are freed to escape into the air. But in the midst of depression, where it can feel like you're drowning, they are stilled. A lot of thought has gone into this cover and it is an eye-catching and effective metaphor for the illness that has had such an impact on Forrest's life.

Forrest's writing is slick and descriptive and she wields language like a conductor shapes music. In this sense Your Voice in My Head reads like a carefully crafted novel. It speaks highly of the author's talent, but it is almost as though she is hiding behind her beautiful words and I battled to connect with her while reading this book. There are moments, especially when she is discussing her psychiatrist, where the person behind the words steps out. But these moments never seemed to last and I would lose that connection. Forrest is bluntly and brutally honest throughout the book, but about situations more than herself. I would have respected her more if that same honesty had been focussed on herself and her feelings.

Your Voice in My Head begins with a spiral of depression, self-harm and bulimia that ultimately leads to a breakdown and Forrest's first meeting with the psychiatrist, Dr R, who will have a significant impact on her recovery and her life. But when Dr R dies, aged 53, she is left bereft and looking for answers to explain her loss. Your Voice in My Head is partially dedicated to Dr R, his family and his patients. From Forrest's descriptions and the notes of appreciation from patients scattered through the book it is clear that he was a remarkable man and that he helped many people. For me, these moments between her and Dr R were the soul of the book. But they are disappointingly far apart. Forrest mentions that she saw Dr R on-and-off for 8 years, yet she seems to have only included a few moments to give the reader a taste of the man. I found myself wondering how she could be so brutally honest about many aspects of her life, but these important moments of her treatment and recovery weren't explored.

The other moments when I really connected with the author was in her descriptions of depression and mania. Depression is often associated with water in the book and Forrest makes repeated references to Millais' Ophelia and it has made me view the famous painting in a different light.

At about the same time that Forrest loses Dr R, she enters into a new relationship with her `Gypsy Husband' (actor Colin Farrell). She throws herself into this partnership and for a while she is really happy. But then the relationship ends and the feelings of abandonment sit heavily on her heart and mind. While I appreciate the significant impact this relationship, and its end, had on Forrest's life, it takes up more of the book than I felt was necessary. So many other things have happened to her that I found the continued references to Farrell tiring after a while.

Your Voice in My Head is a frank exploration of one woman's experience of bipolar disorder. In parts it is a touching tribute to her psychiatrist and family, but some of the obsessing over lost love seemed out of balance to other events. Forrest's writing is beautiful and the book is worth a look, but I won't be adding it to me collection.

On a technical note, I have to say that this book is not as well-written as I expected. The quoted passages that I previously read in various articles, were kind of the best ones. That standard is not always maintained. There are moments of poetic beauty, but then the next line is just a contrived mess. I don't see myself as suffering from a reading comprehension problem, but here and there I really had no idea what Emma Forrest meant.

But here's my single biggest criticism - marketing and selling this book as a story about a woman coping with the loss of her psychiatrist (Dr R), is DISHONEST. More bluntly put - it's a LIE!

Not even in a literal sense does this book focus on Dr R. It's 214 pages long, and after one or two references to Gypsy Husband (Colin Farrell, as we all know) early on, it's ALL about him from page 112 onwards. But more importantly, from an emotional viewpoint, her loss of Gypsy Husband (GH) is clearly the real story here, and it's the shrink's story that's the secondary issue.

Actually, the depiction of Dr R's meaning in her life already suffers early on. Forrest never quite manages to explain how he really affected her in a positive way. He's an anchor, obviously (which GH also later becomes, mind you), but as for the actual contribution to her well-being? She fails to articulate that, I'm afraid. Of course she mentions that he said this and that and made this and that observation, but nothing really seems to carry that much weight. I have a feeling she knew she was selling him short, because she inserts quotes from Dr R's other patients every few pages. As if it was needed to do him justice, because she couldn't do so with her OWN story.

The opposite is true of her account of her relationship with GH. Emotional and intimate, it's by far the more powerful part of the book. The part that stays with one. When Dr R dies, a few months into her relationship with GH, the focus is not on this loss, but on GH's role in her "dealing" with it. It's actually skimmed over pretty quickly, and resurrected only when GH leaves her. Double loss - the first then compounded by the second.

In dealing with this double loss, again, the loss of Dr R seems secondary. Even when she looks up an old colleague of his, it's the loss of GH that overshadows that of Dr R. The loss of GH is the one that gives this book its emotional impact (which it does have), and I would battle to take anyone seriously who claims otherwise. Of course I sympathise with the extreme pain of this loss, because, like most people, I've certainly experienced it. I even understand the need to put this pain into words to somehow deal with it. But then don't "sell" the book as something else.

I'm not gonna guess at what is true or not in this book, but I have to admit that on occasion I did marvel at her memory. That's exactly what the person said? Really? And everyone speaks so poetically? Okay. And then there's the little matter of interpretation, of course, but never mind.

Lastly, at times I wondered whether she was channeling one of Farrell's movie characters or drawing from one of his movies. Langard Road? That's the song in In Bruges, isn't it? And isn't that what John Smith more or less said in The New World? And didn't Bobby Morrow do that in A Home at the End of the World? I honestly couldn't get away from this feeling I had that maybe, somewhere, the lines between reality and fantasy got a little blurred. When someone is that emotionally damaged, is that an unreasonable suspicion?

And now a movie of this kiss-and-tell is in the pipeline, of course. Hmmm...

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