The decision to put bipolar disorder at the centre of a novel is not one I took lightly. Mental illness in fiction has a complicated history — used too often as a shorthand for danger, or for dramatic instability, or as a plot mechanism rather than a human reality.
I did not want to do any of those things. The question was how to avoid them.
The research I did not need to do
Most writers approaching a topic like this would conduct research — reading the literature, interviewing people with the diagnosis, consulting clinicians. I had twenty-seven years of clinical practice as my background. The research was already done.
What I had to do instead was something harder: translate what I knew clinically into what I knew humanly. The clinical knowledge was precise and extensive. The human knowledge was harder to pin down — it lived in the gaps between case notes, in the things patients said and then took back, in the expressions that crossed people's faces when they thought I was not looking.
Kali as person, not patient
The central discipline in writing Kali was to hold her as a person first, and a patient incidentally.
Her diagnosis is not who or what she is. It is something she has — something that has shaped her life profoundly, in ways both seen and unseen — but it is not her identity.
I kept asking myself, at every point in her story: would a person do this? Not would a person with bipolar disorder do this, but would a person — complex, contradictory, doing their best under difficult circumstances — do this?
What I hope readers find
I hope readers who have lived alongside bipolar disorder — as patient or family member — find Kali recognisable. Not in every way, but in the texture of the experience: the exhaustion, the love, the moments of unexpected grace.
And I hope readers who have had no direct experience of it find themselves understanding, by the end, something they did not understand at the beginning.
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