Identity, Bipolar Disorder, and the Problem of Self-Narration in Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind and Ellen Forney’s Marbles

Abstract

The field of narrative medicine holds that personal narratives about illness have the potential to give illness meaning and to create order out of disparate facets of experience, thereby aiding a patient's treatment and resisting universalizing medical discourse. Two narratives of bipolar disorder, Kay Redfield Jamison's prose memoir An Unquiet Mind (1995) and Ellen Forney's graphic memoir Marbles (2012) challenge these ideas. These writers demonstrate that one result of bipolar disorder is a rupture to their sense of identity, making straightforward and verbal forms of narrative impossible. During periods of relative mood stability, reliable memories of mania or depression are equally impossible. As a result, these memoirists seek to develop sources of self-knowledge other than memory and introspection, long the foundations of personal narrative. Finally, An Unquiet Mind and Marbles return attention to questions of selfhood at a time when scholarship on memoir rejects interpretations of life stories as clear and reliable expressions of identity.

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“…1). Bethany Ober Mannon (2019) states that the notion of narrative continuity that constitutes the concept of selfhood is being problematized and ruptured in the context of patients who are diagnosed to be depressed or bipolar. Mannon argues that the narrators through their illness narratives throw light on the "essentially fluid, shifting, and the piecemeal nature of the self theorized by postmodern philosophers and psychologists but those who display these symptoms continually express a strong desire for unified identity and, more importantly agency" (para.…”