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My Bipolar Family
Dutton Adult
September 2008
On Sale: September 4, 2008
394 pages ISBN: 0525950788 EAN: 9780525950783 Hardcover
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Fiction
The Glass Castle meets An Unquiet Mind in a mesmerizing,
loving memoir about growing up in a family plagued by
bipolar disorder. Four out of the five people in poet David Lovelace’s
immediate family have experienced bipolar disorder—
including David himself. His relationship with the disease
began with his artist mother’s severe depressions during
his boyhood in the 1960s and continued through decades of
his preacher father’s increasingly eccentric behavior. The
family’s battle with the disorder reached its apex in 1986,
the year that his father, his brother, and David himself
were all committed in quick succession. Only his sister has
escaped unscathed. Scattershot is Lovelace’s poignant, humorous, and vivid
account of the disease’s effects on his family, and his
gripping exploits as he spent his life running from—and
finally learning to embrace—the madness imprinted on his
genes. Scattershot explores the powerful connections
between fundamentalist religious belief and mental illness,
illuminated by David’s strange and fantastic childhood in
church camps and parish residences. A coming-of-age story punctuated by a series of truly
harrowing experiences, this devastating and empathetic
portrait of the Lovelace family strips away the shame
associated with bipolar disorder and celebrates the
profound creative gifts that come with it.
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