The Collected Schizophrenias
Esmé Weijun Wang
Graywolf Press
Review by Margeaux Feldman
Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays begins with a proclamation: “Schizophrenia terrifies.” For Wang, who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, the most terrifying thing about this diagnosis might be that “people speak of schizophrenics as though they were dead without being dead, gone in the eyes of those around them.” Wang’s collection is her attempt to navigate the terrain of the schizophrenias, of what it means to exist in this liminal space of madness, as the lines between reality and fantasy are all too easily blurred.
A common trope in chronic illness memoirs is the story of diagnosis. Wang’s collection does not withhold that story from the reader, but just as the path to diagnosis was winding, Wang’s telling of it isn’t linear and forces the reader to confront the same confusion she faces. While Wang notes that “some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them boxes and labels, I’ve always found comfort in pre-existing conditions. (…) A diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework—a community, a lineage—and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure.” While Wang will not be offered the solace of cure, she finds the community and lineage she desires, which is what will help keep her tethered to reality.
Woven throughout Wang’s essays are references to others who lived with (or may have lived with) the schizophrenias: Elyn Saks, author of The Center Cannot Hold, who “used her MacArthur money to create a think tank for issues affecting mental health, for whom schizophrenia has shaped her calling”; Malcoum Tate, a thirty-four-year-old man who was killed by his younger sister by the side of the road on December 18, 1988; Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, two twelve-year old girls charged with attempted first-degree murder in 2014; Francesca Woodman, self-portrait artist who died by suicide when she was twenty-two.
That Wang’s lineage is comprised of other schizophrenics isn’t surprising to those of us who are sick. Two years ago, I’d started a similar quest. As I awaited my next doctor’s appointment, I read every book I could find on chronic illness. I not only wanted a diagnosis, much like Wang, but I wanted to find what I’ve called elsewhere “the many sick mothers of my heart.” It was this search for stories like mine that first brought me to Wang’s essay in ELLE “I’m Chronically Ill and Afraid of Being Lazy,” in which Wang discusses her diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease. After reading Wang’s novel, The Border of Paradise, I eagerly awaited the release of The Collected Schizophrenias. When I received an advanced copy, I devoured it. Wang has become one of the many sick mothers of my heart.
As she builds her own lineage, Wang eventually returns to her own mother. She wants to understand how the schizophrenias may have been caused by something other than brain chemistry. Wang wonders where it all began: at what point was she destined to be sick? One possibility she considers comes before she even entered the world:
“My head lodged behind a bone in my mother’s pelvis, which hints of an intergenerational transmission of trauma; stress causes the flooding of cortisol and other chemicals into the brain, and my newly immigrated, newly married young mother had her own psychiatric issues to contend with. Who knows what happens to the malleable and muddy assortment of fetal cells because of such strain?”
Using her own training as a scientist to explain how stress can cause shifts within the body, Wang offers the hypothesis that maybe her mother’s trauma got passed down to her, was transmitted from the maternal body to the “malleable and muddy assortment of fetal cells” that will later be called Esmé.
With this hypothesis, Wang rejects what she calls “the story of schizophrenia” in which the protagonist/the schizophrenia “is first a fine and good vessel with fine and good things inside of it” before then becoming “misshapen through the ravages of psychosis” and filled with “nasty things.” Eventually, “the wicked thoughts and behavior that may ensue become inseparable from the person, who is now unrecognizable from what they once were.” Wang sees the dangers of such a story: the disease becomes fused with the person.
She understands why mental health advocates promote a grammar in which the two are kept separate. Wang notes how “In my peer education courses I was taught to say that I am a person with schizoaffective disorder” instead of “I am a schizophrenic.” In the first formulation, subject and adjective are not inextricably linked. But in her search for an origin, Wang begins to wonder if such untethering is actually helpful for her: “‘Person-first language’ suggests that there is a person in there somewhere without the delusions and the rambling and the catatonia. But what if there isn’t? What happens if I see my disordered mind as a fundamental part of who I am?” Wang is critical of the idea that “there is, deep down, an impeccable self without disorder.” She acknowledges that such a theory of an “unblemished self” might be comforting to some—but for her it might be the case that there is “no impeccable self to reach, and if I continue to struggle toward one, I might go mad in the pursuit.”
Wang’s decision to reject “an impeccable self without disorder” places her amongst disability studies scholars and activists who reject the logic of the cure because of its ties to the medical-industrial complex. To cure implies that there is something wrong with living in anything other than an “unblemished” body. But this move away from cure and towards acceptance of one’s unruly body, to borrow Roxane Gay’s phrase, has not yet been accepted by those who live an able-bodied life. And so The Collected Schizophrenias becomes a vital read for those of us wishing to reimagine a life without a cure.
In letting go of “the story of schizophrenia,” Wang offers a reparative reading of living with mental illness, one that requires her to love and accept the multiple selves that live within her, and these selves becomes a part of her lineage as well. In “L’Appel du Vide,” Wang explains how she takes Polaroids of herself during her worst episodes of psychosis:
“photography is a tool my sick self uses to believe in what exists … They are a bridge, or a mizpah—a Hebrew noun referring to the emotional ties between people, and especially between people separated by distance or death—between one self and the other. The well person has the job of translating the images that the sick person has left behind as evidence.”
Wang creates a catalogue of herself in moments of madness in order to remember that she’s more than this just this moment. They are a gift from her “sick self” to her “well self” and serve as a bridge to connect these two parts that are integral to her being. But creating this bridge between the sick self and the well requires a confrontation with the grotesque nature of the performance. Wang describes looking at “facial expressions that make me cringe later, when I see them in lucidity, because I don’t recognize them, and because they are ugly in their attempt to approximate grins.” This act of translation is thus no easy feat, for it means accepting the “sick self” the lives within.
Towards the end of The Collected Schizophrenias, Wang explains: “I experience mild psychosis here and there, but do not consider it possible to ever be completely free of the schizophrenias. They have been with me for too long, I think, to be obliterated.” Wang resists ending her memoir on the kind of hopeful note that we’ve come to expect with illness memoirs. For Wang, there is no sense in hoping for a cure. What she offers, instead, is another bridge, a radical form of interdependence between the sick and the well, between the dead and the living. It is this community and lineage that enables her to imagine a new story of schizophrenia and a life worth living.
Margeaux Feldman is a writer and educator living in Toronto where she’s completing her PhD in English Literature and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. As a chronically ill femme, Margeaux is committed to creating spaces for mad, disabled, and sick folks to share their stories. She’s the curator of “Unruly Bodies: A Night of Storytelling” and one of the co-founders of “Sick Theories: A Conference on Sickness and Sexuality.” Her writing has been published in The Vault, The Minola Review, GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine, The Puritan, and in various zines across the city. Margeaux is currently at work on a memoir entitled The Bed of Sickness: Essays on Care.