More or Less Maddy by Lisa GenovaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Like Jodi Picoult, Lisa Genova specializes in books that examine the personal consequences of medical and social issues. When I picked it up, I didn’t realize that it was about a young woman with bipolar disorder. (That’s not a spoiler. You’ll figure it out pretty quickly.) Having seen the devastation that illness can cause, the difficulty of getting the right balance of medications to treat it, and the stresses it creates within families, the book rang true.
Maddy Banks is a freshman at NYU when her life starts to spiral. The standard stresses of being away from home and feeling that you aren’t like the other students, the pressures of studying and deadlines, and navigating a new world of relationships lead many first year students to suffer depression. But for a few of them — those who suffer from bipolar disorder — it can have a flipside of manic episodes, which can be equally destructive. I’ve watched this play out in the lives of friends and their children, and the out-of-control behaviours Maddy swirls into felt completely credible.
As a mother, I was particularly intrigued by the portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship. From Maddy’s perspective, her mother is a controlling, negative force. But you can also feel empathy for the mother: she just wants to keep her daughter safe and alive. I loved that the novel subtley provides the dual perspectives: Maddy is upset that her mother would prefer her depressed to manic. To Maddy, when she’s manic she at least feels like she’s truly alive and accomplishing things, but when she’s in a trough, all she wants is for the nightmare to end. But from a mother’s perspective, at least when the daughter is depressed she can be monitored, and, hopfully, kept safe.
Even if your teenager or young adult offspring aren’t bipolar (or, as Maddy prefers, “don’t have bipolar disorder”), reading this book may help you understand their perspectives on what they see as your unwarranted “controlling” behaviour. My daughter (now well-past the challenging teen years) still maintains that it was unreasonable of me to drag her out of a hot-tub when she was a 13-year-old immersed with a group of her male classmates and no adults around. I still insist I did the right thing. I’m looking forward to seeing if and how her perspective changes if and when she has her own teenage daughter.
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