The Monster and the Mirror: Mental Illness, Magic, and the Stories We Tell

Aiello braids together memoir and cultural criticism to interrogate narratives about mental illness in their intriguing if uneven debut. Aiello first became aware they were different from other children after they violently retaliated against a playground bully, horrifying school administrators and leading Aiello to believe that “this new something inside of me is evil and corrupt.” As they grew up, they found refuge in fantasy fiction, escaping into the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons while absorbing the messages they found there about the dangers of “monstrosity.” Interweaving childhood memories, neuroscience, and analyses of popular fantasy texts, Aiello indexes and attempts to reframe those messages, arguing for greater empathy toward people with conditions including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. Some sections, including a passage on the vast variances between experiences of consciousness that compares humans’ limited sensory capacities with the superior senses of the mantis shrimp, are fascinating; others, like a reading of the “One Ring” in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series as a symbol for addiction, feel obvious, and Aiello struggles to maintain a satisfying balance between pathos and critique. Still, there are enough insights on offer to make this worth a look. (Sept.)