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Sep. 23rd, 2013 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsBefore I talk about Sara Polksy's This Is How I Find Her, there are two facts I should probably disclose as potentially biasing:
1. Sara is a friend of mine and I spent a lot of time sitting across from her in coffeeshops while she wrote this book, although I can't remember if I ever talked to her at that time about the fact that
2. My grandmother was manic-depressive, and died of a possibly-accidental medication overdose when my mom was around sixteen
. . . which should give you an idea of the trigger warnings you need to read this book, or indeed the rest of this review. This Is How I Find Her is about a sixteen-year-old girl who acts as caretaker to her severely bipolar mother. The book begins when she finds her mother after a suicide attempt, and her mother has to be hospitalized.
To the best of my knowledge, my mom was away at boarding school when my grandmother died. And, unlike Sophie, my mother had a reasonably large family: two grandmothers, a father, two older sisters. But the way Sophie talks and thinks about her mother, and the way she interacted with her mother as a child entranced by a grown-up who didn't play by the rules, reminds me a lot of the way my mom talked about her mother to us when we were growing up.
My mom's a lot like me in some ways; she likes turning things that happened to her into funny stories. So most of what I know about my grandmother is funny stories. It wasn't until I got a lot older that I started to understand more of what was going on under the punchlines.
Sophie's not actually all that much like my mother in most ways, and This Is How I Find Her is not a funny story. It is a story about guilt, and responsibility, and balancing another person's needs with your own, and BUILDING SUPPORT NETWORKS, which is the thing I appreciate most about it - the fact that nobody should have to face a hard situation on their own, and that it's okay to ask for help.
I can't say "everyone should read this book," because I do think it could potentially be very triggering, especially for people dealing with mental illness themselves - Sophie's mother is a fully-realized and humanized character, but she is not the protagonist, and this is still essentially a book that deals with the effect of mental illness on other people who are not the person who has it. But for myself, I'm very glad I read it; I might ask my mom if she wants to as well, because I'd like to talk about it with her.
1. Sara is a friend of mine and I spent a lot of time sitting across from her in coffeeshops while she wrote this book, although I can't remember if I ever talked to her at that time about the fact that
2. My grandmother was manic-depressive, and died of a possibly-accidental medication overdose when my mom was around sixteen
. . . which should give you an idea of the trigger warnings you need to read this book, or indeed the rest of this review. This Is How I Find Her is about a sixteen-year-old girl who acts as caretaker to her severely bipolar mother. The book begins when she finds her mother after a suicide attempt, and her mother has to be hospitalized.
To the best of my knowledge, my mom was away at boarding school when my grandmother died. And, unlike Sophie, my mother had a reasonably large family: two grandmothers, a father, two older sisters. But the way Sophie talks and thinks about her mother, and the way she interacted with her mother as a child entranced by a grown-up who didn't play by the rules, reminds me a lot of the way my mom talked about her mother to us when we were growing up.
My mom's a lot like me in some ways; she likes turning things that happened to her into funny stories. So most of what I know about my grandmother is funny stories. It wasn't until I got a lot older that I started to understand more of what was going on under the punchlines.
Sophie's not actually all that much like my mother in most ways, and This Is How I Find Her is not a funny story. It is a story about guilt, and responsibility, and balancing another person's needs with your own, and BUILDING SUPPORT NETWORKS, which is the thing I appreciate most about it - the fact that nobody should have to face a hard situation on their own, and that it's okay to ask for help.
I can't say "everyone should read this book," because I do think it could potentially be very triggering, especially for people dealing with mental illness themselves - Sophie's mother is a fully-realized and humanized character, but she is not the protagonist, and this is still essentially a book that deals with the effect of mental illness on other people who are not the person who has it. But for myself, I'm very glad I read it; I might ask my mom if she wants to as well, because I'd like to talk about it with her.
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Date: 2013-09-23 03:55 pm (UTC)I don't know if I will be able to read this one for my own reasons, but please pass on to Sara that I am so glad she wrote on the subject!!
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Date: 2013-09-23 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-24 12:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-24 01:17 am (UTC)