



How Hornbacher fights her way up from a madness that all but destroys her, and what it is like to live in a difficult and sometimes beautiful life and marriage-where bipolar always beckons-is at the center of this brave and heart-stopping memoir. Through scenes of astonishing visceral and emotional power, she takes us inside her own desperate attempts to counteract violently careening mood swings. Hornbacher’s fiercely self-aware portrait of bipolar, starting as early as age four, will surely powerfully change the current debate over whether bipolar can begin in childhood. In Madness, Hornbacher relates that bipolar can spawn eating disorders, substance abuse, promiscuity, and self-mutilation, and that for too long these symptoms have masked, for many of the three million people in America with bipolar, their underlying illness. Now, still a young woman, Hornbacher tells the story that until recently she had no idea was hers to tell: that of her life with Type I ultra-rapid-cycle bipolar disorder, the most severe form of bipolar disease. In 1998, at age twenty-four, Marya Hornbacher published the Pulitzer Prize–nominated, best-selling Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. A collection of essays that explores the experience of solitude, this book travels from a hotel in Las Vegas to an isolated highway in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, moves from the art of Georgia O'Keefe to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and searches out the meaning, and the importance, of solitude in our lives. Marya's seventh book is also in the works. The book makes it clear that science, medicine, and society must collaborate to create a future of mental health, healing, and hope. We’ve Been Healing All Along is the product of nearly a decade of research and travel to answer the question: How do we approach the global crisis in mental health? In addition to conducting more than 1500 interviews-with psychiatric professionals, neuroscientists, policymakers, and, most importantly, people who live with mental health diagnoses-Marya focuses the widely varied and innovative strategies of people who are finding new ways to live and thrive.

Marya is currently at work on her sixth and seventh books.
