Vivid, varied writing on mental illness, creativity captivates

Mental illness exists on a wide continuum, from bare hints of eccentricity to florid psychosis. It can be a difficult topic of discussion. Empathy can normalize struggles, shared by many, to the degree that very real pain becomes effaced. Other approaches cast the subject as profoundly other, assuring the reader of their own safety and sanity.

The Danger to be Sane, by Spanish writer Rosa Montero, skilfully avoids all such hazards. Infused with curiosity and kindness, her latest book traces the roots and conditions of creativity and psychological strife.

An acclaimed multi-form writer, Montero has published more than two dozen works of fiction, including novels, short stories and children’s works. Her career as journalist for Spanish-language newspaper El País spans five decades.

This diverse background has produced a genre-traversing body of work, equal parts journal, investigation, confabulation and literary history. More importantly, it’s not only good, but frequently excellent.

Having suffered panic attacks until her mid-30s, Montero is familiar with the treacherous waters of psychological disquiet. This lends a tenderness towards its subjects, and extends even to a woman who shadowed Montero much of her adult life, both threatening and impersonating her to an uncanny degree. This throughline, connecting multiple narrative points, is unnerving and fascinating.

Taking its title from I think I was enchanted, an Emily Dickinson poem, The Danger to be Sane (translated by Lindsey Ford) maps out common ground amongst the psychologically conflicted and the artistically creative. The latter are frequently, but not exclusively, writers.

Avoiding the too-ready cliché whereby all genius is madness, Montero extends empathy to her subjects. They are neither villain nor saint, but profoundly human.

The histories shared by the creative and the mad extend to traumatic childhoods, a sense of multitudinous subjectivity, nearly disabling fear of time and death and a compulsion toward intensified experience. To each of these touchstones, Montero offers compelling biographical detail and history. Authors Mark Twain and Phillip K. Dick each lost their twin siblings in traumatic fashion in early childhood, and philosopher Louis Althusser was raised a living memorial to a dead uncle. Robert Louis Stevenson and Ursula K. Le Guin both lived with and wrote of a sense of self as fluid and multiple. Montero confesses a strong fear of death, while the artistic attraction by many writers to the intensifying effects of drugs and alcohol is almost expected.

Montero’s framework is so multifaceted that it occasionally feels unfocused. Her employment of scientific theory is mixed at best; too often science is simplistically mechanistic or aestheticized. The brain and consciousness become reduced to machinery, and contentious scientific theory is introduced largely because it provides an ordered beauty to existence.

If there is one aspect of mental illness that is seemingly compulsory, writes Montero, it is loneliness. It is the melancholy of the suffered simultaneously unable to communicate the depth and nuances of their pain while forever excluded from the full scope of easy joy experienced by the unafflicted.

The Danger to be Sane is saturated in an engaging, nearly frenetic energy. The writing is propulsive and exciting. Montero moves between sensitive portrayals of, for example, writers Le Guin and Doris Lessing, her own history, theoretical explorations and poetry with little discord. She writes with learned sensitivity but also a playful sense of humour.

Montero’s ability to connect disparate topics without requiring perfect alignment is not only intellectually impressive, but flat out fun. This is not the niche work we might expect, but instead touches on nearly universal aspects of human experience and conveyed with tremendous skill.

Jarett Myskiw is a teacher in Winnipeg.