ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG, THE COLLECTED

SCHIZOPHRENIAS (2019)
Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental
health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a
different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a
holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected
Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It
is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the
technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual (DSM-5)’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal,
telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched
her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun
Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab
researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience
while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader.
Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On
saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as
the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with
disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox
blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways
she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high
fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing
essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places
her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on
groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and
depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender
Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented
Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The
Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not
forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written
and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor
 ROSS GAY, THE BOOK OF
DELIGHTS (2019)
When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he
envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point
of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped
his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in
blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still
produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this
moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The
Book of Delights, which wanders from moments of connection with strangers
to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a
friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on
my back, saying everything is possible. Everything.”
Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that
delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his
attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small
moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions
of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–
hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and
philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he
thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior
Editor