From the heights to the depths and back again

The National Institute of Mental Health reports that 5.7 million adult Americans -- 2.6% of the population -- suffer from bipolar disorder. Researchers also say that bipolar disorder can shave more than nine years off of someone’s life. And yet, according to the Depression and Bipolar Alliance, it takes an average of 10 years for an appropriate diagnosis.

In “Manic,” a memoir of her life with bipolar disease, Terri Cheney explains why it can take so long. Cheney is a remarkable woman with or without her illness. For years she was a brilliant and accomplished Los Angeles entertainment lawyer with important clients, a six-figure income and a terrible secret. She hid her life-threatening depression -- days when she could not even get out of bed -- as dental problems or a family member’s illness. And her mania, her racing thoughts, self-aggrandizement and boundless energy actually endeared her to the partners she worked for. She was more than a workaholic or Type A personality; she was so devoted to the firm that she hardly slept or ate. If she crashed afterward, it was to be expected.

Cheney knew something was wrong. She knew the depression was crippling, but she enjoyed the upside, the mania that showed her “the world was suddenly all about textures and tastes and sensations, too many and too much to be ignored. It was all so wickedly delicious.” In her young adulthood, the doctors diagnosed only the depression and with Cheney’s strict upbringing, depression was just something she needed to get over. “My father did not believe in psychiatry. He believed in bootstraps -- as in pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and get on with your life.” And Cheney tells us her father was everything to her. His opinion was all that mattered.

Although she was miserable, she soldiered on. The story veers wildly from celebrations of men with green eyes to collecting enough pills to make her sleep forever. She is raped in New Mexico, sent to jail for drug possession and describes in horrifying detail the aftermath of electroshock therapy. We move back and forth through time and treatments at lightning speed. As Cheney says in her preface, “I wanted this book to mirror the disease, to give the reader a visceral experience. That’s why I’ve chosen to tell my life story episodically, rather than in any chronological order.”

Unfortunately, it is hard to connect when we are being thrown about. Too often just as we are drawn into a situation, it ends. The book becomes a list of sometimes terrifying, sometimes exultant events. It fuels our prurient interest, but we are not allowed to get in deep enough to empathize with Cheney, only to stand back and marvel and admire.

And she is a marvel. She is admirable. This is a woman who always performs above expectations, who excels on every test. At its worst this memoir feels like another test. Cheney has decided to be a writer and tell us this story. If that means she must tell us her darkest moments, the inappropriate men, the self-medicating, the insane behavior, then she will, but everything she describes is blamed on the disease.

We never know who Terri Cheney really is. Sure, she tells us she is attractive. Sure, she tells us her clothes, weight, hair and lifestyle matter to her. Sure, she tells us she went to Vassar. Her father is invoked time after time as the center of her existence and her childhood, but we are not allowed to see him. They have one scene together where he behaves callously and inappropriately. Her mother is almost never mentioned. Toward the end of the book Cheney writes about her first bout of depression as a teenager, how long it lasted, how much and what she ate, but not how it changed her. We never learn what her friends at school thought of her absence, or even her parents’ reaction when they found her eating raw pasta by the handful.

And finally, Cheney’s acknowledgments are two pages long, thanking a friend who “fed me through a straw when I was too ill to eat”; another as the only “true humanitarian . . . who has saved my life so many times”; and her mother “who has lived through everything I’ve written about and then some.” Where were these people in the book? A scene with one of them could have told us so much about the real Cheney, the one they obviously know is there.

Writers are admonished to “show, don’t tell.” Cheney shows us bipolar behavior and its effects. Her descriptions of mania are especially strong and visual. But the rest she tells us. She says she has lapses in memory due to drugs and the electroshock therapies, but we do not get to experience these gaps. It is as if she will let us in so far, but no further. Instead of helping us to understand her, the spontaneous and chaotic style of the book appears incredibly rigid and controlled.

“Manic” teaches us about being bipolar. The reader learns a lot. Unfortunately, it feels like a lesson, not a life.

Diana Wagman, a professor at Cal State Long Beach, is the author of the novels “Skin Deep,” “Spontaneous” and “Bump.”