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Bipolar Book Classics
Ellen Forney’s “Marbles”
Ellen Forney is a talented artist and cartoonist who both created the long-running I Was Seven In ‘75’ cartoon strip and collaborated on the national Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian. But my own favorite Forney collaboration is a gloriously smutty little book called LUST, in which Forney illustrated a number of kinky online personal ads that appeared in The Stranger, the Seattle magazine that gave us sex advice columnist Dan Savage. (Savage penned a glowing introduction to “Lust.”)
Forney is both bisexual and bipolar, which means that she’s had to “come out” twice. She shares the experience of coming to terms with her diagnosis and coming out to friends and family about being bipolar in her graphic memoir, MARBLES: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me.
Diagnosed as bipolar at thirty, Forney was miserable about the diagnosis yet secretly thrilled to be an official member of the “crazy artists club,” whose members include brilliant folks like Sylvia Plath and Michelangelo. Although Forney knew that cycling between exuberant mania and deep depression was no way to live, she feared that treatment might cause her to lose the spark that fueled her creativity.
“I don’t want balance, I want brilliance!” she protests. “Meds would hold me down!”
