This appeared in
Spectrum, the newsletter of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance Greater
Chicago
By
Lizzie Simon
Paperback
$13.00
By
Alexis Maislen
Lizzie Simon experienced her first manic-depressive
episode at age 17 in her senior year of high school while studying in
“I
kept receiving signs telling me I had other work to do. It was as if success
had made a lot of noise in my head go away about being successful. I wasn’t
screeching at myself to make more and more. I wasn’t basking in the public
attention I was receiving or gloating through the streets of Tribecca. No, all of a sudden, it seemed things go really
quiet in my head. I longed for a new direction, a new devotion. And then the
signs emerged. The detour, my detour, lay ahead,” she writes in Detour.
Then, she saw the sign. As she rode
the subway back to her
“I am creating this project
for the terrorized seventeen-year-old who has just been through hell and back.
She’s on the precipice of the rest of her life but she doesn’t have the faith
to know it, because all she can see, all anybody is showing her, is the dead
end she feels surrounding her. I am making this journey for her, to help her
through this, the hardest time in her life…I think she’s worth my time, my
energy, my art, and my honesty, because I think if she breaks through she’ll
change the world,” she writes.
Detour began another part of her
journey with this illness. She interviewed six other young successful people
with bipolar disorder all between ages 16 and 30 chronicling their stories and
asking them for advice on how they cope and deal with parents, coworkers,
teachers, and friends. The story takes place in Simon’s fathers’s
white SUV as she cruises from her parent’s home in Rhode Island down the East
Coast and out to California in search of her herd—her herd of other successful,
high-functioning young people with mood disorders like herself. Along the way,
she meets some odd characters, courageous souls, and battles terrifying
existential woes, which almost cause her to abandon her quest and go home. She
even adds some spice by including her love affair with a bipolar drug addict
and fellow New Yorker throughout her book project.
Simon sketches with simplicity, portraying her six
interviewees with honesty and sheer determination to survive and even thrive.
Her empathetic interviews with other young bipolars
as well as her witty insights into her own story make the book come alive. This
book defines a beginning in a whole new genre of fiction and creative
nonfiction about young people and mental illness. This is a must-have for every
young person, their doctor, their friends, and their school counselors.
In 2002, Simon served as an assistant field producer
for the MTV special “True Life: I’m Bipolar,” which was inspired by Detour and HBO recently optioned for the
rights to make the movie.
A recipient of a grant from the Federation for Families
for Children’s Mental Health, Simon is a frequent guest speaker and freelance
writer. She also teaches creative writing classes and is working on a novel
with a character who loses her brother to suicide. You can visit her web site
at www.lizziesimon.com.