Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

Gutkind, himself no stranger to the topic of mental illness (Stuck in Time: The Tragedy of Childhood Mental Illness), has assembled a collection of other authors’ writings that conveys what it is like to experience mental illness and expands the ways in which it can be expressed. The 20 selections are most unified in resisting traditional narrative tropes. Some stories withhold the biographical details about the narrator or protagonist that are obligatory in straightforward accounts, as in the first piece, Ella Wilson’s “Take Care,” which plunges directly into the height of a manic episode. Meanwhile, Ryan Bloom’s “Scuse Me While I Fuck the Sky” experiments with formatting and style to convey what it is like to have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Lesser-known illnesses are also featured: Alison Townsend’s “There’s a Name for That? Living with Trichotillomania” intersperses her own story with research into the compulsion to pull one’s hair. This volume demonstrates that narrative—as opposed to hard, unvarnished facts—can be the most effective way to impart information and promote activism. (June)