My Essay “Normal” published in Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s NERVE TO WRITE

Thrilled that my short essay “Normal,” originally intended for The Lunatics’ Ball and then set aside before I assembled the collection, found a home in the inaugural issue of Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s journal Nerve to Write!

Excerpt:

In the dream, Mom and I are arguing about my aunt Maddy. Again. I’m tense, my chest tight. Which story has my mother just told? The one about Maddy pilfering change from her purse as a teenager? Or some expensive purchase Maddy made? “My little sister just never understood the value of a dollar.” I seem to have entered this scene in the middle and missed the beginning. The scene is familiar enough. We were always arguing about Maddy..…

“Maddy and I are neurodivergent,” I tell her, trying out a new word that I never would have used with my mother to describe myself. Or Maddy. Now I’m sure the conversation is imaginary.

I always called Maddy bipolar. By the time my parents moved to their independent living apartment, I’d been diagnosed as bipolar too, though I didn’t tell my university colleagues or students or acquaintances. In the story I tell myself about myself, I prefer the term manic depressive to bipolar. Easier to romanticize. There was that great Jimi Hendrix song, “Manic Depression,” popular when I was in high school.

“Maddy spent money like there was no tomorrow. Don’t tell me that was neuro-whatever.”

“Extravagance is a symptom of mania,” I try to explain to her. “It’s a mood disorder that affects your behavior.”

My mother’s got a look of smug disbelief, like I’m tired of your big words and intellectual claptrap.

When I assembled essays for The Lunatics’ Ball, I decided that this unpublished essay was too repetitious of other material in the book. My mother’s reaction to my aunt’s bipolar diagnosis (“I’m the only normal one in the family”) comes up more than once in the book, along with stigma and the idea of “normality” and my aunt’s suicide and my mother’s unacknowledged depression. When Sarah Fawn Montgomery did her second call for work for her new magazine Nerve to Write, I looked through my files and resurrected it.

You can read the full essay here and browse the full issue here.

I love the idea of an online journal that serves as “a space for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers to build the literary community we have long been denied.” This issue is a great start, with some compelling writing, and I can’t wait to read the coming issues.

I’ve been a fan of Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s work for a long time and through a number of books, starting with one of her earliest, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir. We invited her to judge our Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest at CRAFT, where I’m one of the creative nonfiction editors. We published her wonderful nonfiction flash “Dash”in CRAFT, and more recently her wonderful braided essay “Empty Nest.”

I did an interview with Sarah Fawn for CRAFT, mostly about her newest book of essays Halfway from Home(Split/Lip Press) but also about Quite Mad. As I said in my introduction to the interview:

Her hybrid memoir made a deep impression on me. Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir chronicles her experiences with anxiety, panic attacks, OCD, and PTSD within the larger context of diagnoses and “cures” for mental illnesses, and the relatively new reliance on medications such as antipsychotics and antidepressants, developed and marketed by Big Pharma. “Obsessed with mental health,” she observes, “America labels mental illness both imaginary and epidemic.” Women, particularly, are affected by assumptions that they require treatment.

Sarah Fawn has commented on false expectations for narrative arcs in disability narratives in a number of her publications and interviews. When I interviewed her for CRAFT in 2023, I was struggling with the shape of The Lunatics’ Ball, which I wouldn’t finish for two more years. What triumphant ending could I possibly come up with? How to conceive of beginnings and endings in my story and the stories of all these other women? Was erasure of our shared neurodivergence really the goal? I appreciated what she had to say about ableist assumptions underlying recovery as the desired outcome for stories like these:

Many stories around mental illness focus on recovery, framing symptoms as the antagonist, the search for treatment as the plot, and the narrator’s recovery as the resolution. But simple recovery is not how mental illness works. Like many disabilities and chronic illnesses, mental illness is often a lifelong experience that ebbs and flows rather than receding entirely. It was important for me to reflect this reality in my memoir, to suggest to readers that while treatment is possible, it is unrealistic and perhaps unwise to speak about recovery in such stark terms. I wanted readers to experience an honest narrative whose arc did not suggest a linear march toward triumphant recovery, but rather a seismograph whose peaks and valleys reveal the daily struggles of living with mental illness but also the immense joys that are possible in spite of—or perhaps even because of—our unique experiences.

More than that, however, I wanted to explore the rich identities associated with disability and chronic illness. When we frame disability and chronic illness as deficits, there is only one narrative outcome that seems preferable—one of eradication and erasure, which enact violence against both the condition and people who experience it. But neurodivergence and chronic pain are active parts of my identity and provide me understanding and tenderness just as they have also led to misunderstanding and trauma. As a result, the arc I constructed in Quite Mad is not one where the narrator becomes free of her illness, but rather one where the narrator comes to understand, explore, and even thrive because of disabilities and their rich cultures and communities.

I also appreciate Sarah Fawn’s experiments with braided and collage and hermit crab and flash essays. And her generosity in sharing ideas for disabled pedagogy in many online essays and a chapbook, available to download for free from Sundress Publications (Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice).

The interview concluded with what she would look for in creative nonfiction in the contest:

I’m looking for work that does not follow predictable patterns, but instead reimagines structural and stylistic possibilities entirely, transporting the reader into a writer’s world as opposed to translating that world for the reader. I want to be immersed in the writer’s mind, experiencing their sense of self in all its tender, powerful, painful, and gorgeous uncertainty. I’m drawn to unapologetic vulnerability, a thorough questioning of subject and self, and an attempt to capture complexity that does not necessarily result in tidy conclusion. Bonus points for attention to image and language that sings.

Which beautifully describes what good creative nonfiction can be, quite apart from contests, and why I love the genre.

By happy coincidence, The Lunatics’ Ball will be coming out with Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press, which also published Sarah Fawn’s hybrid memoir in 2018. I’m pleased that we’ll be press mates.