Review by Lee Wright of "The Book of Niall" by Barry Jones

Niall Adams is a Hollywood actor who seemingly has it all. The career, the good looks, the gorgeous girl, the apartment in LA. 

In this sense, he isn’t too far removed from Bret Easton Ellis’ Patrick Bateman. And like the narrator of American Psycho (1991), Niall Adams is finding out that success, and indeed reality, isn’t all that it used to be, as his grip on the real world is beginning to slip in frequent and alarming ways. 

Niall often feels like he is watching a television, that those around him aren’t real people. Is his entire life nothing more than a pre-written script? Will the director call cut in time to save Niall from himself? 

With surrealist echoes of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) and Spike Jones’ Being John Malkovich (1999), author Barry Jones addresses the difficult conversation of the three Ds, (depression, depersonalisation, and derealisation) in a richly narrated and multi-layered debut graphic novel that occasionally dares to break the fourth wall, and which Jones achieved by teaching himself to draw (a demonstration of extraordinary effort). 

The Book of Niall is a novel which requires some investment. It is at times seductive and deep, and at other times boarding on heady surrealism that some readers might find too impenetrable, though it pays to stay with it. There are many unexpected happenings; turns that takes the story slyly in the direction of horror, then backflips into comedy, leaving the reader upside-down, forcing them to reassess everything they thought and felt about mental health, as Niall teeters on the delicate edge of infinite regression, witnessing himself crumble and reform over the endless cycle of days.  

Reading The Book of Niall is an uncompromising experience, but it does have an important urgency that deserves further thought, and a bigger conversation. 

About the reviewer
Lee Wright has an MA in Creative Writing and is currently working towards a PhD which merges film summary with personal memoir. His short fiction has been published by Fairlight Books, and époque press. He is also writing a novel set in 1950s New Mexico. 

You can read more about The Book of Niall by Barry Jones on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Rosa Fernandez of "Delusions of Grandeur" by David Parkin

I was delighted to discover that the cover of Delusions of Grandeur referred to Blackadder, because that’s what I immediately thought of when I saw it. I was then pleased to discover on reading that David Parkin’s tribute went further, but I won’t spoil that for anyone yet to read this fascinating book.

Having experienced somewhat debilitating mental health problems myself in the past, I was interested to read Parkin’s account of his experiences being sectioned, and the book moves between his own recalled account, his notes during his time on the wards, and the doctors’ notes about him during the whole episode. This combination of sources gives us a fuller appreciation of the events and allows us to enjoy contrasts which make for a lot of the humour in the work.

Parkin refers to himself as a ‘genius,’ ‘mentally positive’ and ‘clever and hilarious,’ all of which is briskly undercut by the notes that state that he ‘continue[s] to overvalue self’; while problematic mental health is clearly nothing to joke about, it’s clear that Parkin wants us to be entertained by the daftness of his predicament. I find it hard to believe he’d have committed much of this to page had he not thought it would be entertaining.

That being said, and perhaps inevitably, the tale takes a darker turn and things get serious. Parkin takes us into his gloom and we await the outcome, although like many stories we know that there will be a happy ending because he lives to tell the tale, as it were. Even the observations about him take on a new softness, and the two disparate views converge at last. The note that ends the book is a joyous message of hope; you’ll need to read the book to find it out.  

About
Rosa Fernandez is a slam-winning poet and sometime proofreader. She also enjoys wearing silly hats. 

Review by Matthew Bright of "The Fear Talking" by Chris Westoby

A prologue to this review: I come from the same small town as the author; his older brother (who appears in The Fear Talking) was my friend through primary school; I got on the same bus, followed the same tortuously long route to the same college, studied the same subjects with the same tutors. Even the music overlaps to a startling degree. Reading this memoir was chock full of moments of incredibly specific recognition, from the pathways and hideaways around Barton and the Humber to the unnerving shock of being addressed with your name by the college principal you'd never met. But not only those—as a reader whose own adolescence and early adulthood suffered more than its share of anxiety there were so many other moments that resounded, seemed familiar: the constant imagining of worst-case outcomes; the excuses planned out weeks ahead; the endless, endless calculations. All of which is a long-winded way to say that reading The Fear Talking was a profoundly moving and uniquely personal experience for me, but what follows is—as best I can—a review for everyone else.

The Fear Talking begins when the memoirist, Chris Westoby, is sixteen years old. September brings with it the start of a new routine: an hour-long journey in a dusty, packed bus across country to Leggott College. But at the same time Chris is suffering from building, debilitating anxiety and the routine swiftly becomes something else: a nervous, nauseated journey to college only to return by the next bus if he's lucky, or on less good days he will let the bus go by and he'll while away the hours tramping around the fields surrounding Barton until he can safely go home and claim it's an 'early day, remember?' He obsesses constantly about digestion—worries in every situation that he might be about to experience a bout of vomiting or diarrhoea, plans every situation by his distance from a bathroom; this builds into a fixation on germs and cleanliness and a quasi-religious fixation with being 'punished.' His inability to articulate how pervasive the anxiety is complicates his relationships with those around him—his parents, his girlfriend, his friends.

The blurbs on the inside of the cover focus on The Fear Talking as a memoir of anxiety and its benefit to readers who wish to understand living with anxiety as the author has. In that regard The Fear Talking does a superlative job; it strikes the tricky balance of using repetition (the cycle of envisioning worst-case scenarios; the obsessive planning of timings to avoid disaster; the counting of tablets; the protective rituals)  to create an immersive sense of what it feels like to live this way. Footnotes run throughout as a bubbling ever-present sub-narrative that insert a litany of worries into mundane moments. On a purely practical-writer level, it's an astonishing feat to maintain this without it becoming frustrating to read; instead it conveys a deep sense of exactly how exhausting it is. Much of the tension of The Fear itself derives from the author's inability to articulate his feelings to those around him, but as a memoir it does an inarguably vivid job of putting it into words. As a window into the experience of anxiety for those who have never experienced it in this way, it's illuminating; as a reflection for those who may be experiencing it without yet having words to explain it, it's invaluable.

Beyond this, though, The Fear Talking is also an adept picture of adolescence;  if the idea of a mental health memoir isn't something that might ordinarily catch your interest, Westoby is also telling a vivid coming-of-age story. It's richly detailed, well-observed and often very funny. He has a light touch in creating the 'characters' that thread throughout—especially in capturing both the crassness and subtleties of teenage boys and their friendships—and in building the small-but-significant defeats and victories that mark the path. Tensions rise between the author and both his girlfriend and his parents, the latter in particular skilfully handled. His sometimes-strained relationship with Emma is rife with complex contradictions—she is both support and catalyst for anxiety—and Westoby certainly cuts himself no slack. A note at the end thanks his parents for supporting him in writing a book that could 'only hurt to read,' but their inability to understand while still trying to help is sympathetic and moving. For a story that is so much about being scared, this is writing at its most fearless.

About the reviewer
Matthew Bright is a writer, editor and designer who's never sure what order to put those in. His fiction has appeared in Tor, Nightmare, Lightspeed, among others, and collected in his Lambda Literary Award finalist collection Stories To Sing In The Dark (Lethe Press, 2019). He is the editor of a number of anthologies and by day works as a book designer. With Christopher Black, he's co-author of the experimental novella Between the Lines, which was reviewed here. You can find him at @mbrightwriter on twitter, or matthew-bright.com.

Review by Laura Besley of "What Doesn’t Kill You: Fifteen Stories of Survival," edited by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska

What Doesn’t Kill You: Fifteen Stories of Survival, edited by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska, is “a hopeful book. Its hope, however, is not the cheap kind peddled by the masters of self-help. It’s the kind of hope you can only find when you let the old delusions go and learn to dance with your fears” (as Dermendzhiyska writes in the Foreword). 

The book is divided into three parts: "Struggle," "Self" and "Striving." Each essay is unique and describes an extremely different experience. Below are four that resonated for me.  

A. J. Ashworth, in her powerful essay, "Eight," describes the panic she felt as a child that she was going to die, a feeling she relives over and over as a debilitating anxiety in adulthood.
  
Kate Leaver’s essay, "A Disappearing Act," not only tackles her personal battle with an eating disorder, “I was essentially trying to kill myself in instalments,” but she explores the wider relationship people have with food and why women especially bow to this pressure: “We teach girls to diminish themselves and how we treat women’s bodies as though they’re public property.”

Rory Bremner describes ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) in his essay, "ADHD and Me," as “[his] best friend and [his] worst enemy.” 

In his essay, "No Cure for Life," Dr. Julian Baggini debunks striving to live life as if in a fairy tale. “The goal,” he writes, “is a life well-lived” and not, necessarily, to live happily ever after for it is “only good to be happy when we are happy for good reasons.”

This is an extremely powerful collection and not always entirely comfortable to read. Personally, it made me revisit some past experiences and feelings, which wasn’t always easy, but paradoxically therein also lies its power; it made me realise that there was hope for me too. Whether or not you or a loved one is dealing with mental illness, I would highly recommend this collection. 


About the reviewer
Laura Besley writes short fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online, as well as in print and in various anthologies. Her flash fiction collection, The Almost Mothers, was published in March 2020. She tweets @laurabesley

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "How Shostakovich Changed My Mind" by Stephen Johnson

In William Nicholson's Shadowlands, C. S. Lewis famously declares: ‘We read to know we’re not alone.’ Stephen Johnson’s remarkable essay-cum-memoir, How Shostakovich Changed My Mind, claims the same for music, and particularly Dmitri Shostakovich's symphonies and quartets: we listen, that is, to know we’re not alone. In Shostakovich's music, Johnson finds a mirror for his own mental illness, trauma, near-suicide: ‘emotions and thoughts I had experienced as terrifying vast, chaotic and threatening acquired ... a sounding form. In the midst of my long-drawn-out isolation, Shostakovich reassured me that I was not utterly alone. Someone else knew what I felt – perhaps even in some mysterious sense “heard” me.’

The music ‘hears’ Johnson despite the apparently vast socio-cultural gulf between composer and listener. Shostakovich lived and worked in the Soviet Union under Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and his music grows out of that context, often explicitly so: ‘Listening to … stories about what people had endured under Soviet Communism, and about what Shostakovich’s music had meant to them, I was increasingly aware of something like guilt. How can I claim that this music speaks to me too, a citizen of a much freer, safer country, who has never known what it is to dread the knock on the door in the small hours?’ Yet, despite this, the music does still ‘speak’ to Johnson and others who never lived under Stalin’s Terror; somehow it does recognise the ‘emotions and thoughts’ of those living in very different contexts, and Johnson lucidly sets out some of the ways in which ‘Shostakovich’s music was never solely about “I,” or even about the great Russian collective “We.” It was for anyone with ears ready to hear.’

Of course, musical experience is not often talked about in these terms, especially in the West; as Johnson himself admits, ‘listening to music’ is often understood as ‘a private, solitary activity,’ a kind of ‘solipsistic reverie.’ But Shostakovich’s music, according to Johnson, can move the listener from solipsistic reverie to collective dreaming, from individualistic pain to shared suffering, from ‘I’ to ‘We.’ Johnson expertly traces how this process is staged in the works themselves: the Fifth Symphony’s slow movement, for example, moves from individual pain and ‘loneliness’ to ‘a moment [when] the string writing fills out with a kind of grainy luminescence, through simple, rich harmonies that sound remarkably close to those of a Russian Orthodox church choir intoning a melancholy blessing. The grief-saturated, alienated voice is suddenly not alone. The suffering is shared.’ In the same movement, that is, Shostakovich’s music can embrace a whole world of 'emotions and thoughts,' a 'broad spectrum [with] “I” at one end, shading gradually into an immense “We” at the other.’ 

‘Shostakovich,’ writes Johnson, ‘can meet us in moments of terrible isolation, as he can in moments of shared joy.’ We listen to him and, as Nicholson’s C. S. Lewis might expect, ‘we’ no longer feel alone; and something similar might be said of the experience of reading Johnson's beautiful memoir.


About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is an author, lecturer, editor and critic. His books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk. 

Review by Sue Mackrell of "Please Hear What I’m Not Saying" edited by Isabelle Kenyon

Words are powerful and these words are more powerful than most. They burst through the gaps and silences surrounding mental health with brutal and searing honesty.

It is sometimes said that creativity comes from a dark place, forged from an intense sensitivity to the highs and lows of what it is to be human. It is certainly true of these poets, who write from direct experience of their own or loved ones’ mental illness.

Images are surprising, sometimes shocking. Grief is a ‘cruel handbag - / its catch snaps shut like jaws’ burying ‘an old compact, / hankie embroidered with an M.’ Clothes are ‘a pile of ugly cocoons’ provoking unwelcome memories of childhood. When ‘Baby Blues / were cover for the hopeless days,’ a baby boy is strapped to his mother’s chest, hidden under a blue raincoat as his mother contemplates suicide. Another baby is ‘kicking out sweet baby legs - / his fat oaf of a mother crawling, hands and knees, walrusing the floor / in search of filth.' Dementia is ‘a sleeping sickness / that makes a drought / of memory.' Anxiety is to ‘walk on the needles / of all my worries, / nettling and biting.’

In ‘My Father’s Paranoia’ Jonathan Taylor writes movingly about  how he once said he would cut the hedge when he was ‘less busy’ and then seeing his father, ‘in a sweat, trembling, / falling over, fitting, minor-stroking ... and all I know now / is how un-busy I actually was / that hot Sunday.’

In my own poem I try to convey the visceral jolt of a sudden descent into depression, the  ‘hangman’s drop to Hades.’ But there is also hope, that ‘streaks of sunlight / will diminish the dark.’

There are moments of beauty, of appreciation of small moments, of survival in these poems which are accessible and engaging but also profound. Those who have felt isolated by mental illness may respond with a sense of recognition, and for others there are opportunities for new insights and understanding.  Crass comments about ‘having an OCD day‘ or patronising ‘jokes’ about ‘schizophrenia’ are challenged here in a way that is courageous and empowering.

About the reviewer
Sue Mackrell ‘s poems and short stories have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Agenda and Fairacre Press. She has an MA from Loughborough University, and taught creative writing there for several years. She enjoys working on local history projects, giving a voice to those who have been silenced, such as local witches and Leicester Conscientious Objectors of the First World War. 

Review by Katy Louise Gearing of "Please Hear What I'm Not Saying," ed. Isabelle Kenyon

There is a lot of poetry about mental health. Some overt, some subtle. As a poet who focuses on writing about my own mental health, I try to read a lot of poetry about it. It makes me feel less alone, as it does for a lot of people. Despite this, I’ve never read a full anthology of mental health poetry. Odd I know, but there we are.

Reading Please Hear What I’m Not Saying was not always an easy experience, but it was always worth it. Along with more subtle hints of mental health tip-toeing into the room, there were steel capped boots running in and kicking everything in sight. I loved it. When reading a book about mental health written by only one person, I find that you’ll only get one point of view. Or one specific set of issues. For instance, I tend to gravitate towards books surrounding depression and anxiety, because they are the issues I suffer with. However, this book contains poetry about several mental health issues, which is refreshing. And heart-breaking. 

What I also found refreshing was the way the poetry was set out - in eight different sections, numbered chronologically, but with no names. Instead there was a space for you to write your own title for each of the eight sections, encouraging you to read and consider what each part does for you, and name it accordingly. I love the openness of this, as if the writers know that we’re all going through individual struggles and, as such, want us to take whatever we need to from the poetry instead of telling us what each part should mean.

I won’t name one favourite poem or poet in here, because to do that would do a disservice to all the other poetry involved. All the poets dissect mental health in their own way, and every one of them does it successfully.  I would just recommend that you read it and take anything you need to from it.


About the reviewer
Katy Louise Gearing is a writer in her 20’s who focuses on poetry surrounding mental health and feminism. She occasionally writes fiction, but tends to get distracted too easily for anything longer than a short story. When not writing, you can probably find her petting cats, or reading.

Review by Rosalind Adam of "Please Hear What I'm Not Saying" edited by Isabelle Kenyon

The poetry anthology Please Hear What I’m Not Saying is described by Isabelle Kenyon as ‘a labour of love.’ It is certainly a mammoth achievement with contributions from over one hundred poets on the subject of mental health and wellbeing. 

Kenyon is author of This is not a Spectacle and The Trees Whispered. She explains that she compiled the anthology for a chance to work with other poets and to make a positive contribution to Mind, the charity that supports people with mental health issues. All profits from the book will go to this charity.  

In October 2017 Kenyon put out a call for submissions on her website, flyonthewallpoetry.co.uk, with an apology that no payments would be made to contributors. She did not expect to receive such an overwhelming number of submissions, a result that must surely reflect the number of people in the country affected by mental health.

Readers have been invited to provide titles for each of the eight sections. Kenyon gives us a clue to their contents in the introduction where she tells us that each section grows ‘with positivity.’ I like the idea of creating my own section headings. It feels as if I have been involved in the compilation process, involved with the content and reminded that we are all affected in some way by mental health issues.

There are too many poems to mention them all. As I read the anthology, I visited over a hundred people’s minds with my ‘face pressed into the dirt’ and ‘the all too familiar mantra sounding loud and clear / in my ear: I hate you, please don’t leave me,' the reminder that it’s ‘Easier to paint a smile of lies / than stumble over the truth,’ and the reassurance that ‘storm clouds part/and I can see / chinks of light appearing.’ This anthology is, in fact, full of familiar emotions and recognisable scenarios. Even if the proceeds were not going to Mind Charity, I would still buy a copy just to reassure myself that other people feel the same way too.


About the reviewer
Rosalind Adam is a writer and student on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. Her blog is: http://rosalindadam.blogspot.co.uk/