Getting a Read: The Center Cannot Hold
It’s my firm belief that when a person recommends a book to me, they’re handing me an inside look at their soul. In this series, “Getting a Read,” I try to uncover truth about books and their recommenders.
THE RECOMMENDER
Ian Webber, a college friend I lost touch with for a good while. Early this year we grabbed coffee and realized our post-college selves have a ton of happy and not-so-happy things in common. I’m glad to have reconnected with this kindred spirit and was thrilled to read his recommendation.
HOW TO READ IT
When you have time to chew on the words and think carefully about the story. I read this book in July and it’s taken me months to pull this recommendation together, largely because it was a tough nut to crack. Maybe it’s best to save this book for a dark moment? Maybe it’s better to save it for a brighter moment… all depends on whether you’re the type to mirror your inner life with the art you consume or try to shift the locus of your emotional center by looking for its opposite.
REVIEW: The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn R. Saks
I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the MacArthur Foundation. I first heard about it several years ago on NPR. To determine who gets it, a board of smart people thinks through who might be the best creative minds in the world, granting only a few of these awards per year. The prize? $100,000 to fund the project of your choice. The reason? You’re brilliant and you deserve it.
Of all the awards out there in the universe, this is the only one I ever daydream about receiving. I mean, can you imagine? Here’s $100,000, they grantors say, we know you’ll put it to good use because you’re awesome.
I’m in awe of the people who receive this award. Past recipients are people like Harold Bloom, Sandra Cisneros, and TaNehisi Coates, to name just a few of the ones I recognized when looking over the list. They’re simply some of the best and brightest humans to have ever lived. So when I turned Ian’s book over to peruse the back and saw that Elyn Saks is a MacArthur Fellow I fangirled—hard.
This book is a memoir of schizophrenia, and I considered putting this review in the controversial reads archive on Patreon for a long time. Why? Because mental illness is a tricky topic. It took bravery for this author to write this memoir (a tiny bit more detail to be found here). I’ve worked hard to do what I can to be sensitive to the incredibly vulnerable contents of the book and speak carefully about a topic that every person experiences and understands differently.
Here are a few statistics on schizophrenia to keep in mind: In 2014 it was estimated that this mental illness affects 1.1% of people, which totaled at the time to 2.6 million adults in the US alone. Those living with schizophrenia have a higher mortality rate, and their number one cause of premature death is suicide.
The unfortunate truth is that those with schizophrenia are often easily dismissed by society due to the difficulties presented by the symptoms of the disease. Throughout the book, Dr. Saks speaks about needing to hide her illness, denying she’s ill at all, and grappling with the aftermath of her illness breaking through. Along the way she has to fight stigma, keep from losing opportunities, and deal with serious internal and external instability. Finally, she takes a public stance by uncovering her life’s narrative for all to see, daring the public to dismiss her if we will, and not seeming to care anymore if that’s our choice.
Saks accomplishes a lot of the work of drawing the reader in through simple, matter-of-fact, storytelling. She drops into delusional babbling, or schizophasia as it’s properly named, as though there’s nothing out of the ordinary about it. She might as well have said “And then I had a headache and needed help getting home because of the pain.” But of course, that’s the way she sees herself internally. No one in her life treats these episodes quite like a headache.
In fact, these episodes are as likely to land her back in her dorm room as they are in the nearest mental hospital and her treatment in such depends on the laws and norms of the continent she happens to be on at the moment. The hospital she admits herself to in Britain seems to be far more kind to those who find themselves patients than the counterpoint American hospital she ends up in later on. English doctors do not tie her down nor force her to remain against her will as the American ones do. It’s her experiences with terrible treatment facilities that in part drive her toward her work in law to correct the problems inherent in the system. Today, because of the work of Dr. Saks and others like her, we do better at supporting this vulnerable population, though there is still much to be done.
Saks does the work to gain the empathy of her reader, and to me, her battles felt almost familiar. She in great detail illuminates the internal battle to accept her illness that we often hear about, explaining why she tried so hard to get off her meds. Further, she details the reality of her precarious professional situation that demanded she maintain her silence on her struggles until she was well established in her career.
Perhaps because of the profound truths spoken in this book, I found myself slowing down to read it. I read super fast—in fact, my reading speed is one of the reasons I decided to tackle this blog project. But this book talked to me. It felt as though Dr. Saks was sitting across from me, just telling her story. I was drawn in, partly because mental illness is a fascinating topic to me, partly because some things struck home, and mostly because Saks figured out how to tell her story and succeeded at finding her voice.
This book is a memoir, plain and simple, though it’s contents certainly seem a bit out of the ordinary. In summary, it’s the story of a girl who fought a battle of becoming with her parents, who tried to achieve and make a life for herself after leaving home, and found that life was a bit harder to achieve than she first expected. Though the stakes are as high as elite academia can make them, Dr. Saks’ story is universal in its own way. There’s a tiny piece of her fear that I think we can all recognize in ourselves, and that’s really what’s at the heart of a good memoir; a universal truth we can all grab onto. Some may resonate with the fear of being abandoned that Saks feels when she parts from her first psychotherapist. Others may connect with Saks’ terror of failing to achieve. Still others may understand deeply the feeling of risk that comes along with being truly open about one’s struggles. For me, I was drawn in through it all, and I hope you will be too.
If you know Derrida, you’ll likely recognize the decentering throwback in the title (which, yes, is also a quote from a pre-Derridian-era Yeat’s poem as I noted in the above picture, but hear me out). The idea that the “center,” or capital-T-Truth, isn’t really the point of things bleeds throughout postmodern thinking, and I wonder if this isn’t actually the heart of Saks’ thesis. That no matter what, for Saks, the heart of reality lies in the acceptance of life’s total deconstruction… or perhaps she implies that it’s only in the deconstruction that we’re able to put things all the way back together again.
THE RECOMMENDER IN REVIEW
Every time I think I have a read on Ian, I learn something new that changes my perspective. It’s a quality of his that I appreciate deeply—conversations with him challenge me to broaden my perspective at the same time as they so often lighten my load. Ian always looks for ways to help and one of the ways he does that best is by simply attempting to connect genuinely with each person he encounters. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Ian picked up this book as a way to connect with reality, with narrative, from a new perspective—but truthfully, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that had nothing to do with it. Enough to say that this brilliant friend of mine found a great book, felt all the feels with it, and I’m grateful for his recommendation.
WHERE TO FIND IT
Anywhere books are sold, and I’d really recommend picking up a physical copy. The pages of this trade paperback fall open beautifully and make for a great, hands-on reading experience.
