The others were in 20 (an epilogue brings us up to 2016, the year the book was first published in Germany).
“The World at My Back” recounts three prolonged manic episodes and their painful aftermaths, the first in 1999, when Melle was in his 20s and newly living in Berlin.
Joining the likes of Kay Redfield Jamison’s “An Unquiet Mind,” Leonora Carrington’s “Down Below” and, more recently, Arnold Thomas Fanning’s harrowing “Mind on Fire,” is the German novelist and translator Thomas Melle’s illuminating memoir of the illness that has devastated his life. When they are successful, such reports grant us rare access to the psychic antipodes - a chaotic realm of hyper-signification and cosmic paranoia far beyond the boundaries of healthy consciousness. Living with bipolar disorder - formerly called manic depression - is hard enough, but memoirists afflicted with it face an additional quandary: how to turn their bizarre and frightening experiences into books that grip rather than repel the reader.
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