“I didn’t expect there to be so much of me in it. “I’ve certainly found with the memoirs that I love and that mean the most to me, you get the sense that the author is as much surprised by what’s being written as you are as a reader,” she says, mentioning Judith Moore’s Fat Girl: A True Story and Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? as two of her recent favourites. R, but ended up an entirely different beast. R to lung cancer, and GH to a crippling breakup.įorrest, who has written the novels Namedropper, Thin Skin, and Cherries in the Snow, says the book started out as a tribute to Dr. But her new stability is tested when she loses both men around the same time-Dr. R, and then a heady relationship with an eccentric unnamed Hollywood actor she dubs GH, for “gypsy husband” (and whom a simple Google search will reveal as Colin Farrell). Her long, slow road to recovery is characterized by an unassuming, optimistic psychiatrist she calls Dr. She’s lonely in NYC, and starts to spiral into those “cold deep patches of the sea”-purging, secretly cutting her arms, legs, and stomach with razors, and eventually attempting suicide.

Your Voice in My Head (Random House) chronicles Forrest’s journey from her London home, at 22, to Manhattan, where she would be writing for the Guardian. “But what I have done is named these things.”¦Even if I can’t offer a solution or an answer, even if I can’t tell people, ”˜This is what to do to be better,’ just hearing a feeling named makes them feel better. “I don’t think my story is special, I don’t think my story is any worse than anyone else’s-or in fact as bad as most people’s stories,” she’s quick to add. I’d be very happy if I have articulated how these things feel-if I have pinpointed things and brought clarity. “And the same is true of madness, the same is true of depression.

“I started as a music writer, and the thing about music is it’s really hard to describe how music sounds,” she continues, referring to the career she began at 15 for the Guardian. “It’s trying to name the unnameable,” explains the composed 33-year-old writer, sitting in a Vancouver hotel restaurant and choosing her words as thoughtfully as she does in her prose.

What’s most remarkable about the way she articulates these feelings is that she was still working her way through the murk of mental illness when she started her book. The penetration, obviously, the loss of control. Depression is a stagnant lake.” And then there’s bulimia: “the wicked twin of orgasm. As for mania, it “flows like a river approaching a waterfall. “The thought of suicide is masculine energy, with manicured nails, like a mafioso,” she says in the book. The events Emma Forrest reveals in her new memoir, Your Voice in My Head, are messy-from toxic sexual relationships to self-cutting to suicide attempts-but what’s most striking is the crystalline clarity with which she writes about them.

Your voice in my head by emma forrest