Excerpt from Memoir-in-Progress
I’m still promoting my third memoir, A Silent Treatment, but I prefer to read from the next thing, Treated (a working title that won’t work). I learned last night that my deadline was August of this year. I need to stop treating1 book contracts like Apple product agreements—and I can no longer say with a steely gaze, “It’s on the syllabus.”
The deadline has been extended by a year—and even that feels soon. So Substack is where I’ll process Treated-related research. If Substack turns into a “bad” distraction, I’ll slink away. (Whether a distraction is “bad” or “good” is, I think, a lot more nuanced than some alarmist “attention” books imply.) I’m testing whether social media might actually help me as a memoirist.
Here’s where Treated opens.2 Where it goes after this, I’m still figuring out.
I miss finding meaning these days—that is, I find meaning missing from my day-to-day. Like that day, years ago, when a stranger shouted—Move, you lunatic!—and I searched for the moon because luna in Latin means moon.
Next I was in an emergency room.
Busy night, a doctor told a nurse.
Full moon, the nurse replied.
A man called me a lunatic, I said. Did you know the word lunatic—
The man who brought you here? the doctor interrupted.
Someone brought me here? I asked.
What I mean is, I miss mania, the way it pulls patterns out of my day-to-day.
I contemplate tapering off my meds.
That’s a terrible idea, my friend Anita tells me.
But I’m not getting any writing done, I say.
You published three books, she reminds me, while medicated. And you have another under contract.
To confirm that I rarely wrote well when manic, I begin reading my hospital notebooks. I find the journal I kept when Anita and I met thirteen years ago. We were roommates at a hospital just outside of New York City. I was twenty-eight, stuck in yet another manic episode in yet another psychiatric ward. Anita was twenty-four, experiencing her first manic episode. A lack of sleep had left her with purple crescents under her eyes. We sat on our uncomfortable twin beds and shared stories that would make new roommates in most situations uncomfortable.
Anita told me that in the ambulance she had suspected she was being driven to a secret location where a team of progressive political operatives would prime her for a presidential campaign.
I knew the recent election was over, she said. This was for a future campaign.
She looked down while confiding all this, so I offered my own embarrassing story: Once I was crossing the street and hallucinated that my eyes had fallen out. I held up traffic while I patted the ground, searching for my eyes.
And that was our introduction, because in a psych ward, friendships are reverse-engineered; you start with the deep stuff and get to the shallow stuff later.
The rest of that day we shared a blanket on the couch in the common room, called ourselves feral shelter cats (a metaphor, we assured the nurses), applied mental health criteria to saints and celebrities, and laughed until we forgot why we were laughing.
Did you two come in together? a patient asked.
We just met, I said.
The patient turned up the television to drown out our laughter.
Anita said, I asked them if they put us together because I’m supposed to learn from you.
I laughed harder.
What did they say?
No!
I wrote about other patients more than I wrote about myself. I spent pages on a man who’d tried to kill himself. He was broke. Loan sharks were after him, he explained. His life insurance would cover his debts, pay for his daughter’s college, and leave his wife enough money to live on.
It would cover everything, he said.
If my dad had killed himself, I said, I would have been devastated, no matter his intentions.
My dad died of natural causes when I was eighteen. He was eighty. I believed I was in the hospital because, a decade later, I still missed him.
Do you think I’m crazy? the man asked me.
No, I said. I think you love your family.
Writing about someone else, it becomes impossible not to reveal something of oneself.
(I first typed revel. Revel something of oneself. I like that.)
Some of the other patients, after seeing me write in my journals, asked if I’d help them write about their lives. I listened, took notes. I shaped what they said and handed their stories back to them.
It sounds like me, they said in different ways, in their own ways.
I wonder if some of them are dead. I met many of them after they had tried to die. One had stabbed herself in the stomach. Another had tried to hang himself. Usually, the patients I met became patients after taking too many pills.
Or not enough, they joked.
(A common joke in the common room.)
They often came to me for advice, thinking I had the answers because I had been hospitalized five, six, seven times.
If I had the answers, I said, I wouldn’t be back here.
There was the middle-aged man who’d recently finished his seven-year prison sentence (for what, I didn’t ask). Every day he scrubbed the woodwork with his white hand towels. He’d run his finger along the walls and show me dust that I couldn’t see.
Then there was the college math major. Spiders infested her brain on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which overlapped with her fractal geometry class, she explained, making it hard for her to understand the professor. I asked her if spider webs were fractals. She said that they were, and that maybe she’d had it all wrong. Maybe the spiders were trying to help her.
And then there was the schoolteacher whose family used her notebooks against her in court. The judge ruled that she had to be hospitalized. All because of these notebooks, she said. She held one open for me and read from it. It described her ambitions: to translate all languages for all countries in the United Nations, to resolve domestic terrorism by holding peace gatherings at public libraries, to abolish the death penalty here and abroad. On one page were magazine cut-outs of a watermelon, a woman, and a wave. On another page were kittens, a cup of coffee, and a kangaroo. Alliteration held each set of images together, although her writing rarely alliterated. I pointed this out, and she said: What’s alliteration?
Then there was the former EMT. We spoke an entire afternoon, and he seemed rational until he said that his parents had hanged him as a baby from the basement pipes.
They looped an electrical wire around my neck, he specified.
He felt so convinced of this that I briefly wondered: Could it be possible?
I told him his memory impressed me. He said that he started hearing voices when he was seventeen and they described the hanging. Until then, he said, he didn’t know his parents had abused him. He said he hadn’t told his doctor, and I asked why.
Not enough time, he said.
In my notes, I asked, How can his doctor treat him without knowing about the voices?
These patients said they wished their doctors would listen like I did.
This, I decided, was my purpose on the ward: to help patients deliver their life stories to doctors.
The meetings with our treatment teams were too short, we agreed.
So I interviewed the patients: When did your thoughts and feelings start interfering with your lives?
I then drafted illness history timelines.
But after a doctor discovered I was organizing their narratives, he told me to stop.
How else are we supposed to tell our life stories in these ten-minute meetings? I asked him.
No one is asking for anyone’s life story, he said.
I just don’t see how you can treat us, I explained, without knowing our stories.
But as a writer, I should have known: the story isn’t as important as how the story is told.
Treatment, Treated, treating: unintentional polyptoton. It might be my favorite figure of speech.
I doubt I’ll publish many (or possibly any) other excerpts on Substack.