From memories of childhood to the drug-fuelled haze of teenagerdom,to the joys and challenges of motherhood and career,Spargo-Ryan offers her story as she navigates the maze of diagnoses and experiences:anxiety,depression,obsessive-compulsive disorder,psychosis,ADHD,PTSD,agoraphobia. In intermittent chapters,the reader is given glimpses into therapy sessions,tracking Spargo-Ryan’s progress,which,like any mental health trajectory,is not linear.
The book’s chapters are each named for a clinical description of aspects of mental illness – “Lack of stability in the view of the self”,“Injuring oneself with the view to die” – creating a mosaic of the things that can be experienced,while also illustrating the limitations of such descriptions.
The author acknowledges,too,the limitations and impossibility of memory,bringing to mind the writer Nadja Spiegelman,whose 2016 memoir,I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This, similarly explored the disparities between different people’s recollections of the same events. Spargo-Ryan’s memories,particularly of childhood,are often punctuated with caveats:I think,I don’t remember. “Writing from memory can never be objective,” she writes,and even less so when mental conditions such as psychosis take you further into,and therefore out of,your own mind. The mind can betray,making you question your own reality:“gaslights all the way down”.
Yet the writing of this book is the author’s way back into herself. “I offer my own story as evidence I can build a self,” Spargo-Ryan writes,and largely it is the act of writing that allows the author to make sense of it all:“By remembering and contextualising,I have written and rewritten my identity.” She paints the writer as sculptor,fashioning a meaningful existence from the materials available.
WhileA Kind of Magic does include research and commentary,particularly about the ways in which institutions fall short,it mostly is one woman’s life:a jigsaw puzzle of disparate pieces trying to cohere. As a memoir,naturally the balance between personal narrative and research is heavily skewed towards the former – the reader is so deeply inside Spargo-Ryan’s head that it can be difficult to extricate the relationship between those lived experiences and the science. It sometimes reads as diaristic,with some anecdotes more relevant or impactful than others – a further whittling down may not have gone astray.
But if the purpose is to allow readers to physically feel the intense and often terrifying mental health struggle,Spargo-Ryan nails it – her beautiful prose is especially effective when she is describing panic and anxiety attacks with breathless run-on sentences,giving outsiders an idea of what it feels like to be inside those kinds of moments. The debilitating and all-consuming nature of living with mental illness is drawn with clarity,pushing up against the “degree to which people imagine mental illness is performative”.