A Manic-Depressive’s Chronicle of a Reckless Life of Excess

ELECTROBOY

A Memoir of Mania

By Andy Behrman

Random House

288 pages; $24.95

Reading “Electroboy,” Andy Behrman’s in-your-face memoir of his experience with manic-depression, is like trying to cuddle up to a porcupine. No matter how you open your arms to embrace the story, it’s hard to walk away unscathed.

Behrman chronicles years of high living, fast spending and thrill-inducing episodes between his college days and his mid-30s, during which he lives a bigger-than-life existence exacerbated by the effects of manic-depression.

Later, he is convicted of a felony for art forgery, sentenced to prison and finally comes face to face with the reality of his disorder.

In the book’s preface, Behrman skillfully describes the illness: “Manic depression for me is like having the most perfect prescription eyeglasses with which to see the world. Everything is precisely outlined. Colors are cartoonlike.... [L]ife appears in front of you on an oversized movie screen .... When I’m manic, my senses are so heightened, I’m so awake and alert, that my eyelashes fluttering on the pillow sound like thunder.”

Led by a narrator who is both self-aware and wonderfully intense, one waits for Behrman to give a deeper understanding of what it means to be mentally ill, to provide a glimpse of how newfound progress in psychotropic drugs has impacted treatment and prognosis, and to offer some insight into the experience of controversial electroconvulsive therapy--the shock treatments hinted at in the book’s title--which Behrman undergoes 19 times.

Lamentably, this wait is in vain. The cognizant stance with which Behrman begins the memoir is abandoned immediately after the preface, revisited only for a scant few pages at the end. The rest of the book is devoted to the re-creation of look-at-me scenes.

We’re given Behrman getting money hand over fist by cheating family, friends and business associates; Behrman making outrageous business deals; Behrman participating in raunchy scenes of sexual excess that are recounted in minute detail as if to demonstrate just how downright fun life can be when you’re manic. As his life gets more and more out of control, an uninviting smugness taints the account; it seems he’s trying to prove that his reckless life is one to be envied.

Much of the memoir, in fact, may leave readers wondering what, exactly, the scenes have to do with the subject at hand. True: Drug use, alcohol abuse, shopping sprees and sexual excess are known ingredients of manic-depression. The narrative is intent, though, on celebrating these excesses without discussing their origin and effects on his life.

Many of the details--such as Behrman’s role in arranging boy toys for visiting executives when he worked for Armani--tell us nothing about his struggle. Unfortunately, this exhibitionist pose does little to earn credibility on the author’s part, much less understanding from the reader. The result is frustrating because he’s obviously more aware than he lets on; the preface and ending alone do a wonderful job of telling the gut-level story.

Instead of cleaving to that degree of honesty, though, Behrman fills the work with a litany of hip restaurants and clubs, the last-minute plane tickets he buys with the stash of cash he keeps in his freezer, the designer clothes he wears and the many women and men with whom he has tawdry sex.

When he is sentenced to incarceration, his parents pay for him to serve his time in a halfway house in lieu of prison. There, he is given vast freedoms--allowed out daily to go to work, even to attend Thanksgiving dinner at a family member’s house. When his newly purchased designer wardrobe--”The Calvin Klein Prison Collection,” he jokes--is stolen, his roommate confronts him with his obliviousness: “[W]e’re living among criminals. What do you expect?” Readers can’t help wondering the same thing.

All of which creates a problem when the tone of the book shifts, in the final pages, to a genuine understanding of what mental illness has done to him. After being exasperated by his lack of self-awareness, it’s hard to scrounge up empathy for his electroconvulsive therapy and ever-changing mix of prescription drugs. And really, he doesn’t want our empathy. Writing of his slow recovery, of learning to take medication as indicated instead of on whim, of keeping regular hours for sleeping and eating--of avoiding the behaviors he knows will set off the disease--Behrman clearly resents his own restoration: “ ... I don’t like any of it. I miss the planes, the trips, the money, the dinners, the alcohol, the drugs and the sex. My recovery,” he tells us, “represents a tremendous loss.”

Manic-depression, Behrman writes, afflicts 2 million Americans, and millions more go undiagnosed. There is an enormous amount of suffering represented by those figures. “Electroboy,” in its narcissistic world, scarcely hints at the larger tragedy.