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Sex, shopping, suicide: The life of a 'manic'
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"I didn't tell anyone that I was going to Santa Fe to kill myself. I figured that was more information than people needed, plus it might interfere with my travel plans if anyone found out the truth." So opens the first chapter of "Manic: A Memoir" and what was supposed to be the last chapter in Terri Cheney's life, a chaos filled with madness, depression and suicidal intentions.
Living with bipolar disorder, Cheney's life has been a roller-coaster with highs and lows and very few in-betweens. What has kept her alive has been her father, but with him gone, Cheney decides she has nothing to live for.
After days of not eating, not sleeping and not sitting still but lots of shopping, talking and having sex with strangers, she is ready to die, and she chooses Christmas Eve to be her last day. Having saved up her father's cancer medication, Cheney knows exactly how to end her life.
However, despite swallowing hundreds of pills, she miraculously survives and wakes up in a hospital. Euphoric after her near-death experience, Cheney sees the life she has been given back as a gift. "I didn't want this life that I'd been given back, but it was a gift, nonetheless, and Christmas gifts should always be opened and honored," she writes.
Written more episodically than chronologically, Cheney goes back and forth in her life to illustrate how life can be for a person with bipolar disorder: frantic spending, constant chatter, clandestine sexual affairs and hysteria, followed by a dark, deep can't-get-out-of-bed depression. Even her body responds to the extremes of highs and lows. Manic, she is "perfect" and "naturally incandescent." As Cheney describes it: "If I smiled at you, you caught the glow. If I touched you, you felt fire. You never realized how cold you had been until we kissed."
Depressed, however, she is sleep deprived but not tired, starved but insatiable, and high on life but not willing to live. Even her body responds adversely: "My hair turns lank and oily, the sheets grow stale, and tiny demons ooze from all my pores," Cheney writes about her metamorphosis.
Cheney does not go into greater detail about her childhood and family, which leaves the reader with some questions; however, with "Manic," she provides her audience with an insight into how it is to live with bipolar disorder.
In the end, her biggest accomplishment as a writer is the storytelling itself: By talking openly about her bipolar disorder, she takes away a little bit of the hush-hush and the stigma with which mental illness is associated.
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