Nonfiction gets a bad rap. When we think of nonfiction, we think of textbooks, flowery essays, and dry biographies of famous dead people, all requiring knowledge of field-specific jargon or a dictionary to decipher. I’m guilty of perpetuating this stereotype; for years, when people asked me what I read, I told them I was game for everything but nonfiction. Which, in hindsight, is hilarious. I’ve been reading nonfiction since I was a kid. I thought if it didn’t bore me out of my skull, then it didn’t count.

I read James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small series. I read Diary of a Young Girl. I read I Am A Pencil by Sam Swope so many times in my teens that I wore out the cover. I started my life of crime by stealing my school’s copy of Night by Elie Wiesel (which my Language Arts teacher knew. She checked my locker at the end of the year and, like any thirteen-year-old aspiring criminal, I’d forgotten to hide it. She pulled it out and handed it to me with a wink). I didn’t count any of these as nonfiction because, in my head, they were stories! Sure, they happened to real people, but did that count? They weren’t spewing facts, figures, and dates at me, so I discounted their nonfiction status. 

Then I was a senior in high school, taking an AP Psychology class with one of my favorite teachers. He handed out The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and assigned us one chapter a night. “Please don’t read ahead,” he said, wagging his finger, “I need us all on the same page.” I opened the book and saw facts and, heaven help me, statistics. It was real nonfiction. But that night I found myself engrossed. Curious. And incredibly lucky I’d saved that assignment for last because I stayed up reading the rest of the night. I finished the book in three days. 

Figuring out that nonfiction, even the fact-filled, statistical analysis kind, wasn’t by definition dull, opened the floodgates. Since I’d come to this realization by reading nonfiction about psychology, I decided that reading more psychology books was a safe bet. So I read. And read. And read some more. Essays, books, and even the textbook for class that I initially only skimmed became my reading lists. It helped that I dated (and eventually married) someone who went to college to become a mental health counselor; I had a wealth of psychology reads to choose from. When my partner graduated, though, the well dried up. I haven’t been reading nonfiction, psychology or otherwise, since. 

It’s time to change that. 

For the second nonfiction book of this year, I chose The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang. From what I’ve read, this falls closer to the personal essay/memoir kind of nonfiction rather than the statistical analysis of nonfiction books like The Tipping Point. It details the life of the author who struggles to find a diagnosis that fits her multiple symptoms. The book contains several essays, all written about different experiences with her mental and physical illnesses, and how those illnesses and her coping skills affect her life. 

The Collected Schizophrenias stood out to me for two main reasons. The first is that most books written about mental illness are written by doctors or other professionals within the field of psychology. What’s leftover are books written by caregivers sharing their experience in caring for family members or loved ones that cannot live on their own. It’s rare to see a book written by the person experiencing the illness itself; even rarer when the person lives with episodes of psychosis (the inability to tell reality from hallucination). Wang is no doctor, psychologist, or caregiver- she’s an average person with an MFA in fiction who just so happened to be diagnosed, and able to live with, her illness. It will be a unique, raw look into how chronic psychosis, disability, and illness disrupt a person’s life and how they manage alongside it. 

The second is that, since this is an internal view of having a schizoaffective disorder and not someone observing a person with schizoaffective disorder, the mythology around the illnesses can be challenged. Schizophrenia is one of the most stigmatized mental illnesses in our culture, with movies and books playing up people with psychosis as violent. In reality, people diagnosed with these illnesses are more likely to be victims of violence, the majority of which comes from their caregivers. Psychotic mental disorders are taboo in our society- reading a first-hand account of living with a schizoaffective disorder can go a long way toward destigmatizing the illness and the people who live with it their entire lives.

Finding books on subjects we love is easy. Finding innovative books on subjects we love is harder. I’m so excited to open up The Collected Schizophrenias and see the world as Wang sees it. Perspectives other than our own are key to opening our eyes and broadening our horizons. The human experience is different for everyone, and getting a glimpse into another world, one we know so little about, is sure to be captivating. I hope you’ll all join me in reading this book! Links are available in the “Book of the Month” tab. Happy reading!