Image: A collage of images from The Night Parade (2024), illustrated by Cori Nakamura Lin. Source: Scribe Publications.
In my experience, there are two enormously difficult facets of writing about mental illness. One is bucking the shame, which is part of the point of the writing—the price of advocacy is giving up secrets. The other is capturing the unspeakable.
Sometimes the inability to express these lived experiences comes from the enduring stigma surrounding mental health struggles, where the most common narrative has space for only two pigeonholes: ‘Just ask for help’ or ‘Too hard’. In reality, both are false solutions to the complexity of individual experience.
More often, the ineffable isolation comes from a lack of language. How to start a conversation that society is determined not to have? Writers with lived experiences of mental ill-health are silenced by logistics and fear.
Don’t look me in the eye and I might get this out—if the words exist.
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Mental health conversations have come a long way. It feels now like most people are familiar with depression and anxiety—their contours and general traits, if not their specifics. Public awareness campaigns have normalised these conditions to the point where many people can openly share a bad day, whether through a quiet word with a friend, a social media post or (if you have an exceptionally good manager) calling in sick and citing mental health as the reason. We’re comfortable enough to campaign for acceptance of depression through corporate cupcakes. Some areas of mental health have now firmly been shined up and commodified.
Don’t look me in the eye and I might get this out—if the words exist.
There’s a gap, though, between the slogans and the difficult days or weeks or months or lifetimes underpinned by mental health conditions, including those that don’t carry the same kind of mainstream awareness. Or even a gap between understanding that mental illness can be debilitating in theory and then having to explain to my dentist why I’ve been screening their calls. Personal care tasks are some days insurmountable, and I’m scared of facing the long-term impact of this.
Then some complex mental health conditions have been casualised to the point of misunderstanding, entering the common lexicon in misleading ways. It’s not ‘obsessive-compulsive’ to insist on an orderly desk. It’s not ‘schizophrenic’ to change your mind a number of times a day.
Writing (and reading) is a potential bridge for this gap—if the words can be found. Two early releases of 2024, The Night Parade and The Pulling, break open the idea of overcoming silence in their own ways.
Images: The Pulling (2024) and The Night Parade (2024).
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There are as many unutterable things as there are individual experiences of mental illness. For American author Jami Nakamura Lin, the thing that cannot be uttered is her bipolar disorder, which manifested first in her teenage years as uncontainable rage. The Night Parade details Lin’s early years of undiagnosed struggle and later years of a struggle with a name and a treatment plan—different, but the same. At first, Lin does this in a straight line—from childhood to adolescence, from young person to parent. But soon this memoir moves from the chronological into a creative form that shatters by necessity.
Lin reflects on the role of class and social support in treatment, her worry over inheritance and what early indicators of mental ill-health might look like in her toddler. When Lin’s father dies, this whirlpool of generalised tumult turns violent. The Night Parade turns grief and mental illness into a metaphor that’s captured in the collective stories of yōkai —the demons, spirits and magical apparitions of Japanese folklore. The yōkai are richly illustrated in the book by Lin’s sister, Cori.
This memoir moves from the chronological into a creative form that shatters by necessity.
Each of the yōkai in The Night Parade serves a function. They describe the haunting of a highly specialised domain: the sea when it’s been mistreated, spurned lovers, night wanderings. A ghost whale avenges its own destruction. A mermaid warns coastal inhabitants of impending tragedy. Cunning foxes possess those overtaken by mania and psychosis. Yōkai provide Lin with ‘a way to make the formless concrete, to try to give a name to the nameless thing that keeps us up at night’. The yōkai march the streets as the ‘Night Circus’, a collective noun whose English translation often amounts to ‘riot’—an apt complicating notion that might apply equally to mental health issues.
Image: The yōkai kappa in The Night Parade, illustrated by Cori Nakamura Lin.
Lin’s approach is described by the book’s subtitle as ‘speculative memoir’. This burgeoning style involves speculation in the form of embracing doubt and uncertainty. A well-known example of the genre is Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. The book’s inventive form mimics the doubt and slippage experienced by intimate partner abuse victim-survivors. The New Yorker describes its form as ‘shifting angles of illumination [which] achieve a full, strange representation of the subject’. In Lin’s case, this means pulling lineages of mythology, fairytale and science fiction into her personal stories. These speculative elements allow for the yōkai to be analogous to discomfort made flesh, a book-length motif. The fantastical inclusions also introduce time travel, so that multiple timelines can run parallel in ways that more accurately represent the pandemonium of the neurodivergent experience.
This alignment of folktale and faith puts the reader in a liminal state, perfect for receiving the unutterable. When a thing cannot be directly stared down or addressed, cannot be ‘named and tamed’ (as many a psychologist encourages), metaphor offers new possibilities. But Lin’s yōkai only partly function as metaphor for her mental illness. They have just as much, or maybe more, to say about identity, intergenerational trauma and inheritance. The metaphor, like the experience of mental illness, is deeply tangled with the body, with community, with the structures that determine our fates.
However, the very unreal seems as effective a way to reach the truth as excruciatingly detailed realism. This latter approach is the one Sydney author Adele Dumont harnesses in The Pulling. Her debut memoir is the story of compulsive hair-pulling (trichotillomania), about overwhelming avoidance and shame, and about ongoing management of the condition. The book’s plot progresses from childhood nail-biting to adolescent hair-pulling—in their raw, lived form—before Dumont learns there are names and possible causes for these behaviours.
The very unreal seems as effective a way to reach the truth as excruciatingly detailed realism.
Naming also forms an important turning point in The Pulling. Dumont slowly uncovers the reality of her condition: that she’s not alone, that she’s not wrong and that it does indeed have a name. ‘For some reason, I think people are readier to believe and to sympathise when they are told something has a name,’ she writes. In this case, providing the name alone isn’t enough. This is not a story about ‘recovery’—not quite, not ever.
Where the reader may flinch, the author does not. I have never read anything that so vulnerably details the difficult experiences of a mental health condition; especially not one as little-known as thrichotillomania (Dumont recalls having to even educate GPs on the condition). Dumont shares details such as how an appropriate strand of hair is selected, the texture of it as her thumb and forefinger gain purchase, and the differences in root structure and their attendant levels of satisfaction as she inspects them and lays them out according to her ritual.
Dumont’s insistence on detail is almost forensic, resisting the flattening effect of naming her condition: ‘I hate that this single word should signify so much about me; that it should collapse so much of my life—interior and exterior—into its seven syllables.’ This is the kind of detailing Lin also worries about: ‘The problem is that I want you to understand how deeply I fear me without making you also fear me. This is an impossible tightrope.’
If the words for experience do exist, as Dumont manages to muster, do we dare speak them? Will this level of honesty help or hinder understanding of mental health conditions?
Captured by both authors is a challenge central to memoir—the reality of poor memory. Mental illness affects perception. Personally, my most acute stages were often shrouded in disassociation.
Where the reader may flinch, the author does not.
The lies we tell ourselves also form a barrier—both writers scour old journals and notebooks for clues but acknowledge the things they left out of their own archives in an effort to make them go away. Dumont describes her episodes as ‘surreal, unrecorded and unrepeatable pockets’. Lin’s takes the form of the yōkai, mysterious and elusive. What was fastidiously unwritten, or what was once committed to memory or archive, becomes a chaotic, disorganised, tyrannical devil’s advocate within the mental health story. Somehow, they both make room for it.
If the stories we tell ourselves must hold room for slippage and doubt, so must those that are passed forward for a readership.
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Fragmentation is such a calling card of the creative non-fiction genre that it’s now a trope. We put little stars or extended white spaces between ideas. We let the reader in to co-create meaning. We splay out notions and create pretty little patterns from them. Oooh, the essay is fragmented, how edgy. This is something I use in my own writing, and something I’m sure people roll their eyes at for its predictability. It’s only a problem for me when it’s done without reason.
Fragmentation, beyond mere style, allows space for the divine—those elements that Dumont refers to variously as ‘grace’, ‘magic’ and ‘sublime’. The unsayable, the haunting, the grief and the shame. For me, fragmentation is often the only way to truly represent time as it moves in the mind (repetitive, patchy, jumbled), and to represent the fuckery of complex ideas like intergenerational trauma or circular causality. Early in The Night Parade, Lin addresses the problem of form directly. ‘I need something,’ she writes. ‘I have too much story and not enough shape. I overflow my banks’.
The possibilities of communication are opened up by the insistence that there can be a different way. The only way of communicating such a perceived ‘brokenness’ as mental illness is to break the form, to discard it, to play in the muck.
There’s some hope in this, that both the shame and the unsayable might not be tamed but set free.
