What are your memories of growing up in the midwest? As I was getting diagnosed, I learned more about what was in my bloodline. A lot of that has to do with cultural stuff – this idea of saving face and not wanting to be open about these things that are not considered appropriate to talk about or that might bring shame upon the family. There was all this family secrecy around mental illness. I didn’t know about my mother’s cousin who had killed himself. I didn’t know about my great-aunt who had died in a mental institution. I didn’t know about my mother’s mental illness. In the beginning, I didn’t know that there was any mental illness in my family tree. You write: “I’ve inherited a love of writing and a talent for the visual arts from my mother, as well as her long and tapered fingers I’ve also inherited a tendency for madness.” Could you tell me more about that inheritance of mental illness? That snowballed into what is now this book. It became rather popular and I received a lot of emails and kind comments. After that episode was over, I polished the essay and ended up finding a home for it on the Toast website. As a way of coping, I was writing about it, which became the essay Perdition Days. I was waiting around to see if my first novel would ever sell and I was experiencing a severe episode of psychosis. I had never planned to write a nonfiction book – I have an MFA in fiction. Why did you decide to write The Collected Schizophrenias ?
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