Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in
2-3 sentences?
Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir is an inventive and
striking memoir about motherhood, madness, and the grace of second and third
chances. Kerry Neville shares the story of how she was caught in the perfect
storm of bipolar disorder, anorexia, and alcoholism when her children were
young and her marriage failing and how she found her way back to joy and hope.
Electric shock therapy, hospitalizations, and even an exorcism were desperate,
if failed, lifelines. But even in that dark chaos, she held fast to an abiding
belief in love and fought to regain her own life and her life with her
children.
What boundaries did you break in the
writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?
The easiest way to answer this question is to quote the
opening of the memoir:
“How do you write a
memoir when you can’t remember? And how then do you honor and unravel that
tangle of time?...Electric Shock Treatments erased years of my linear memory.
What remains? Unreliable chaotic approximation. Incomplete jerry-rigged record.
Splinters and fragments: a fat file of doctors’ shorthand notes and coded
diagnoses, Social Security Disability Insurance legalities, journal entries
composed in situ, email correspondence with therapist, and friends who fill in
the blanks.
“External
documentation functions with the specious authority of a third-person limited
narrator. Even my journals, though read as
if extemporaneous synchronous records, are always belated after-accounts.
We don’t live in time’s flow but in time’s lag. Our brains create a coherent
understanding of the world from stimuli that travel at different times and
speeds. Auditory processing is faster than visual processing. Starter pistol
rather than flash of light. The brain waits for the slowest information to arrive
before “making sense” of “now.” An eighty-millisecond lag between what is happening and what we understand is happening.
“When I read my
medical records and journals, scroll through photos, and listen to my friends
recount who I was and what I was doing and saying and how I was lying and dying
and trying and not trying to get myself into sensible order? That “I” stands in
strange, estranged proximity. I cast forwards and backwards through lost and
found time, never able to catch up. My unruly IIIIIIIIII’s arrive at different
times and speeds to these pages.
“I’ve tried and tried to write this happened and then this happened and
then this happened and now it’s done, but each attempt was a failed
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of my corpse on the dissection table, so I ditched
linear plot-forward-in-time.”
Additionally, the memoir is divided
into three sections according to St. Augustine’s understanding of time as he
outlines in Confessions: “present of things past, memory; present of things
present, sight; present of things future, expectation.”
Courage: There was no other way to
write this story—except to find a way to represent how I—we—construct ourselves
as changing selves every day, how we revise and rerevise our stories of how we
have arrived in this moment now. The memoir is an attempt at simultaneity:
becoming and unbecoming at the same time. So, linear plot can’t do that on the
page with its neat, progressive timeline.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
My agent sent the manuscript out to the big presses, and I
received positive feedback but…ultimately, no, no, no, no. I knew the structure
would be a difficult sell—but memoirs are, anyway. My agent persevered because
she believed the book would find a home, the right editor, at the right time. I
know how fortunate I am to have an agent willing to keep on keeping on with the
manuscript. Eventually, Kim Davis and her editorial team at Madville Publishing
responded with a quick (!) and enthusiastic yes. The right home, the right
editor, the right time!
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Write from your me-ness”—you don’t have to be decorous,
polite, modest, or measured. Write out of your fierceness, unruliness, and
daring. Disturb the universe. (Fyi: it took me far too long to realize writing,
at least early draft writing, is ferocious and feral. Late draft revision is
meticulous and exacting.)
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
What surprised me was how much I learned about what is
beyond me—that is, research that brought the world and all its complicated
wonders inside my understanding of self-as-world-on-the-page. Biology,
neuroscience, anatomy, philosophy, botany, history, geology, religion,
mythology!
How did you find the title of your book?
The title is the title of a long-retired blog I kept when I
was in my dark, desperate times. Writing that blog about my mental health
complications helped me to understand that I wasn’t the only momma, the only human
being going through the really effing hard stuff—I heard from many readers who
connected to my story (if not to exact facts, then to the ebb and flow of
despair and joy). I had a running list of possible titles for the memoir but I
kept coming back to Momma May Be Mad—there’s the sound of the M’s, but,
too, there’s the uncertainty. Not “maybe” but “may be”—or may not be. And maybe
it’s all of is: motherhood, madness, hysteria, wandering wombs, one body
creating another body, body-at-hand and body-of-work. We are shapeshifters,
phoenixes rising again and again from the ash. What are the forces at work on
the inside and on the outside that contribute to despair, give rise to joy, and
allow us to redeem ourselves?
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
My story includes recovering from an eating disorder, anorexia,
so for the first third of the book, my relationship with food and eating was
dark, complicated—I was doing everything I could not to eat. But then, the rest
of the book is about finding joy and pleasure again in eating well and good:
yes, healthy, balanced eating, but also the lascivious pleasure in what tastes
good!
No recipe, but I’ll note two moments from the memoir that
blaze white hot:
Evening, and I am on the roof of my riad in Marrakech eating
the last tawny, rosy cheeked apricot
that I’d bought from the fruit vendor. The call to prayer rises around me. My
teeth split the fuzzy skin and my mouth is lit up by the warm, sweet flesh.
Evening, and I am in
a small cottage on the top of a mountain in Ireland sitting beside a lovely man
who has just brought us tea and KitKat bars. The world is growing dark outside
and we are in happy, desiring companionship. We sit quietly by the fire, dunking
the chocolate bars into the tea. We know what comes next! And we are happy to
wait for it.
***
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.kerry-neville.com
READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER: https://madvillepublishing.com/product/momma-may-be-mad/
