Review: Loud In The House Of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl by Stacey Pershall

Dear Lit Loves,

This has been a particularly difficult week for me as my close friend and dearest teaching colleague is in the final stage of small cell neuroendocrine cancer.  And my colleague and friend put up such a valiant fight against the beast we all know as cancer.  I knew she would.  She helped me during my first year of teaching at an inner city middle school and she also was once in the military so she did not suffer fools as my mom says.  At any rate I started reading the memoir Loud In The House Of Myself:  Memoir of a Strange Girl by Stacey Pershall.  This story is about a girl growing up in rural Arkansas who suffers from not only bipolar disorder but also borderline personality disorder.  She also spirals back and forth between anorexia as well as bulimia throughout the book. 

The first symptoms that I noticed regarding bipolar disorder in this book was a seriously low self-esteem brought on by intense bullying at school and a mom that was hyperfocused on her second child, a son, as well as a dad who had definite rage and anger issues.  Because she doesn't seem to be able to be accepted by others, she often punishes herself.  The one thing she discovers she can control is her weight which fluctuates throughout the book.  Of the many people and students I've known with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, this is the first person who regularly wrote hateful things about herself on her body with a black, Sharpie marker followed by hiding in a closet for hours at a stretch. 

The second interesting point in this book is how this girl's mood swings are triggered by whether she is in a fulfulling relationship or not.  Seriously, you could almost see the euphoria in this girl's life when she was first falling for a guy and subsequently walking through a field of daisys.  The colors she sees are magnified as well as the sounds so no wonder she appeared to be walking on air during her manic episodes.  As soon as the relationship went south she spiraled down into a trench of depression.  And heaven knows this girl tried twenty four different drugs throughout her life attempting to find the combination that would keep her moods stable.  She did finally discover the three drugs that when taken together worked well for her. 

I think I was most disturbed by the girl's suicide attempts.  And when I say she would make these attempts on a grand scale, I am not kidding.  Many people with a bipolar diagnosis are quite self-absorbed.  If they get to a low point of thinking they're not good enough, people are rejecting them, and they're not worthy, it becomes all-consuming to end the misery.  It's scary, but very real.  The other interesting note of this particular book is how the girl starts getting tattooed to commemorate various points or phases in her life.  I wish the author had discussed in greater detail the therapy that eventually started working for her called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.  I was so confused about it and how it differed from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that by the end of the book, I googled it to determine how it is unique.  Mainly, the therapy includes more concentration on validation and changing behaviors.  Still, I would have liked to have seen a chapter written about how this therapy worked for her and others over the course of a three month period.

This book is still a good read.  If you have someone in your life that has wild mood swings and you can't surmise what's going on with the person, this is the book for you.  What works in terms of medication for persons with bipolar disorder varies from person to person.  For this author I think she must maintain a constant vigilance in order to recognize when she is in the midst of becoming a whirling dervish and when she is headed into trench warfare with depression.  I think she has learned to recognize the symptoms of each pendulum swing in order to know when she needs to get help for herself.  The tragic part, in terms of what I've seen and witnessed, is when people never get to that point.  Or worse, they think nothing's wrong with them; it's everybody else's fault.  You can't help yourself much less anyone else unless you learn to have a healthy relationship with you.

Till my next update,
Grace