The Collected Schizophrenias

September 15, 2018

Named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, Wang also received the Whiting Award for her nonfiction and the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for this collection of essays, which explores mental illness (also the subject of her novel, The Border of Paradise). Here she tracks being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, the consequences in her life, and the problem with labels generally, addressing both members of "the collected schizophrenias" like herself and those seeking understanding.

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Starred review from February 15, 2019
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, schizophrenia afflicts 1.1-percent of the American adult population. In this moving memoir about broken brains, Wang, a self-described overachieving daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, reveals that she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder eight years after experiencing her first hallucinations. It is terrifying when the mind loses the ability to make rational decisions, she notes. By describing her own experiences and referring to pop culture, from such films as The Exorcist and Lucy to such books as Joan Didion's Blue Nights and Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind, Wang makes the reader feel what it's like to lose your mind and its frightening consequences (she was hospitalized against her will on three occasions). But she also had to overcome her culture's reticence about mental illness ( We don't talk about these things, her mother said). Worse, Wang observes that the only time she sees schizophrenics in the news is when they commit mass shootings or other acts of horrific violence. She also discusses how she compensates for her condition. Working for someone else in a high-stress environment (she uses McDonald's as an example), she would rapidly begin to decompensate, but allowing her to work for herself exerts less pressure on my mind. An invaluable work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2018
A collection of autobiographical essays on schizophrenia, which "shirks reality in favor of its own internal logic."In addition to a detailed history of the treatment of mental illness in America, informed by her time as a researcher at Stanford, Wang (The Border of Paradise, 2016) keenly investigates the lived experience of "the schizophrenias." Covering a variety of issues--including the practice of involuntary committal and life in a psychiatric institution, the difficulties of navigating college with a mental disorder, the public discourse on suicide, the financial problems caused by a chronic illness and an uncaring insurance industry--the author consistently demonstrates her precise attunement to not only the stories buried in official statistics and dry historical sources, but also to the broader implications of her own personal experiences. Unfortunately, Wang's prose is often clinical when it needs to be harrowing or affective when it needs to be precise, and the transition from the macro view to the micro is occasionally inelegant. What makes these essays worthwhile is their attention to both the broad historical and cultural implications of their subject matter and the personal, first-person perspective that is so often lost in historical accounts. The author is an adroit researcher and an exacting describer, but the two halves often fail to mesh effectively, as when she writes that "with chronic illness, life persists astride illness unless the illness spikes to acuity; at that point, surviving from one second to the next is the greatest ambition." Such sentences attempt to swerve from direct exposition to personal reflection yet do not fully manage the transition, leaving a highly personal anecdote dressed in too-clinical description. Still, the book remains a necessary antidote to the often ignorant and fearmongering depictions of mental illness in popular culture.Better integration of the two thematic halves and prose that was more lively and varied would have made the collection truly great, but even so it remains quite powerful and certainly useful for fellow sufferers.

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