My understanding of mental illness comes from two sources: dry nonfiction describing the history of treatment and the chemistry of the brain, or from pop culture, the Angelina Jolies who manic-pixie-dream-girl their way around a mental institution. Until I read The Collected Schizophrenias, a marvelous book of essays by Esme Weijun Wang, I hadn’t begun to understand what severe mental illness might be like from a first person point-of-view.
HLR’s raw, fragmentary novella History of Present Complaint is more than first-person: I am the sufferer, because, as the Editor’s Note states, “One morning in late September 2019, you suffered an acute psychotic episode…” We then travel through the experience in three sections (present complaint, describing the episode itself; history of present complaint, that includes recollections and evidence of past episodes; and post complaint, about the aftermath). In each, HLR kidnaps the reader through her poetic use of language: the uncertain half-memories, the episodes dyed red by fear, and the violence, often self-inflicted (or then again, maybe it’s not; it may have been inflicted by the five men who broke into my house and tortured me).
History of Present Complaint often left me grasping for clarity on time and place, which meant that I got a glimpse of what it might be like to experience a psychotic episode with a level of evocation that a traditional narrative could not provide. What might it be like to be detained in a hospital against your will, or to get lost in your own neighborhood, or to stab yourself with a knife because the instructions (to a frozen dinner) told you to? And because the book is so deeply subjective, the moments when the reader is pulled up and out are that much more harrowing, like in a later section entitled, “Things You’ll Find When She Dies.”
Through its uncomfortable closeness, History of Present Complaint absorbed me into the back of the ambulance and slammed me into a padded cell, giving me an insider’s sense of fear and danger. Not for the faint of heart, but then again, neither is psychosis.
Published by Close to the Bone (2021)