Imprint: Bodley Head
Published: 14/02/2019
ISBN: 9781847925428
Length: 224 Pages
Dimensions: 222mm x 24mm x 144mm
Weight: 346g
RRP: £16.99
Let Me Not Be Mad is an immersive, virtuosic and provocative investigation of madness, love and self-destruction that defies categorisation.
'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian
'I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness' Stephen Fry
'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest' Olivia Laing
A consulting room with two people in it. One of them is talking, the other is listening. Both of them need help.
Throughout his life, A K Benjamin has found himself drawn to extreme behaviour – as a screenwriter, a contemplative monk, a counsellor for addicts, a support-worker for gang-members and ultimately as a clinical neuropsychologist.
His book begins as a series of superbly realised clinical encounters with anonymised patients, some recently traumatised, some on the brink of mental collapse, others already in freefall. But with each encounter, it becomes increasingly and disturbingly apparent that what we are reading is not really about the patients at all: it is about the author’s own fevered descent into mental illness and mania as he confronts his traumatic past.
Layered with twists and revelations, Let Me Not Be Mad challenges the boundary between fact and fiction to provide a thrilling drama of self-diagnosis: a hall of mirrors blazing with energy, intensity, humour and emotion. And though shockingly personal, it also reveals something deep and dark in western culture that is driving millions of us to distraction and collapse.
Imprint: Bodley Head
Published: 14/02/2019
ISBN: 9781847925428
Length: 224 Pages
Dimensions: 222mm x 24mm x 144mm
Weight: 346g
RRP: £16.99
"Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat"
"A mental-health memoir like no other … a genre-defying wake-up call of a book … compelling … clever humane … holding back a sly twist for the end"
"Let Me Not be Mad is stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I’ve read. I read it in two sittings. Extraordinary"
"A perfectly extraordinary – not to mention extraordinarily perfect – tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book"
"Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka’s 'The Country Doctor', and you still won’t quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book"
"Brilliant and alarming, written with cunning and self-lacerating honesty. The doctor is sick, but his intelligence, his scope of reference, his damaged sagacity could save us all"
"Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths"
"A treasure of a book. Intricately woven and deeply intimate, it reveals things that astonish, surprise and improve us"
"A truly astonishing journey into and out of the mind. Not content to pin you down with the intense intimacy of his storytelling Benjamin dramatises some of the most profound and intractable issues in neuroscience and psychiatry. I’ve never read anything like it"
"Like a meeting of Oliver Sacks and Hunter S Thompson … this is not a simple narrative of striking cases written by a far-seeing practitioner. It’s a turbo-charged race"