Marya Hornbacher connected with some more of her many readers Thursday night at Skaneateles’s Creekside Books and Coffee. She brought smiles, humor and hope to a subject that usually isn’t thought to contain those elements: bipolar disorder.
The author has reached the New York Times best-seller list with her book “Madness: A Bipolar Life.” It is a compelling first person account of her life-long experience with the mental illness.
In spring, Hornbacher was invited to come do a reading from the book by Susan Cox, an employee of the store.
“I sent her an email and I said that I really enjoyed her book,” Cox said. “We managed to work this out.”
Connecting to her audience is a key element to Hornbacher’s writing life.
“Writing a book that other people can connect with is your whole purpose as a writer,” she said. “Your purpose is not to be known. Your purpose is not to get famous or any of that. Your purpose is to connect with a reader — one reader out there in the world holding your book in their hands. If you can connect with that one reader effectively you did your job.”
On Thursday, Hornbacher had just driven in from New Paltz where she had lectured to 600 people on her book “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia.” This night the 35-year-old from Minneapolis was speaking to an intimate audience of 10 fans. They tucked away between the biography and young adult sections of the cozy store on Fennell Street.
Hornbacher stood behind a wooden podium and read with an intense energy. Manic. Staccato. Hardly ever taking her eyes off the pages to look up. She wrote the book in the same style.
“I was writing the way one writes when one is manic so you can get a sense of what it is like,” she said “I was trying to show in the language what the mood state is like.”
The excerpts, and the book, are ordered chronologically from the author’s first recollections of bipolar disorder as a 4-year-old girl to her adulthood. Hornbacher’s reading to the audience at the bookstore was varied.
It included a scene of intense mesmerizing conversation between her mother and herself as a 4-year-old; recollections of a misguided road trip to the desert in which she and her co-dependent boyfriend lose perspective; and a somewhat comical episode of her doing battle with her washing machine.
Not all incidents in the book are light hearted. Hornbacher’s story is at times graphic and somewhat grim.
In the incident of the road trip, Hornbacher recalled that the companions perspective was so distorted by mental illness that what they thought of a trip of only a few weeks was actually an escapade of more than three months.
But the writer’s work has found a place in the hearts of readers and critics alike. Her book, “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia,” has been published in 14 languages. The author and journalist have been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and today she receives thousands of pieces of mail a week. She reads all of them, she said.
At Creekside, fans had come from as far way as Rochester and Ithaca to hear her.
Gina Cardarelli of Syracuse said Hornbacher was her favorite author. She’s read all her books and enjoyed “Madness: A Bipolar Life.”
“I really liked it,” she said. “It is stream-of-consciousness. I can relate to it.”
Hornbacher said she wants readers to take away a sense of hope and inspiration from her book. Even the title is designed to provoke a discussion of mental illness.
“I wanted people to go, ‘Oh is she allowed to call it madness’,” Hornbacher said. “I wanted to use the word so that we would start questioning the word. What do we mean by madness? What do we mean by crazy? I would never in a million years refer to someone else as crazy, but those are ways I bring some levity in my experience of it.”
The author said she is currently managing her illness well. She is on medication and hasn’t been hospitalized in over two years. She continues to write, now with a concentration on poetry.
“I have a lot of good days,” she said. “A good day is when my mood stays relatively steady and I’m able to work all day. My bipolar is in remission which is a delightful state of affairs.”
But she knows with her illness may come more ups and downs. That is one reason she keeps very busy.
“I may get sick at some point,” she said. “There’s no guarantee. While I’m OK now I want to get some things done.”
http://www.cnylink.com/cnynews/view_news.php?news_id=1257874346
Chatboard (1)