“Female craziness is something I’m very interested in…how it can manifest itself, what it means, what pressures force someone into these behaviours. I’m pretty much obsessed with madness.
–Helen Oyeyemi, The Times Interview
I’m always taken when someone writes fiction that explores mental illness, even more so when the writer is a woman, and of colour.
For so long and still African Americans and peoples of colour in the United States, particularly remain, and for good reason, leery of exploring the inner workings of the mind. We are especially cautious when those inner workings have gone awry from what culture deems normal.
As a writer who is also a psychotherapist, I cannot and choose not to shy from the boundaries of these murky waters. As a psychotherapist, I obviously have a innate interest in exploring and observing when human thoughts meander to the edges of concensual reality.
As a writer I am always looking to broaden not only my consciousness of what we consider the concensual reality, but alsop the many paths along which conventional judgment segues into the bizaare. Rarely are the insane born into madness.
Life and its experiences guide us along a path wherein we are often left with choices that are neither good or bad, rather a mixture of both. Many writers and artists come to our work seeking wholeness in our afflictions with depression or other mental illnesses, something that Oyeyemi seems to have made peace with.
“…School was difficult — disruptive behaviour and suspension dovetailed with bouts of clinical depression, culminating in an attempted overdose on pills at 15…She’s through her experience of depression too, she says. After years of being ‘very adamantly “no!” towards medication’, she “chilled out and took some” in her final year at Cambridge. Combined with a gradual lowering of her guard that came with constantly discussing herself on the promotional trail, she has now “rejoined humanity . . . I think I’m much more sociable…”
In an effort to remain normal many of us choose a path that oftentimes leaves us uncomfortable with ourselves, our anxieties, our idiosyncracies–the little abnormalities that make us human and create the unique stamp or mark our presence leaves in the wake of our absence.
All humans have the capacity for insanity. And the most insane of us possess humanity, if but a little.
That Helen Oyeyemi, a child of Nigerian parents and who was raised in Great Britain after the age of 4 years old, finds herself fascinated by the macabre is impressive. And certainly at such a young age. With three books under her belt and fourth underway, Oyeyemi has already left her mark on the literary world.
A forty-eight year-old wife of 27 years and mother of 3 who has spent and inordinate amount of time trying to keep it together, do things in the conventional way, despite my artistic leanings and urge to write, never mind I’m a psychotherapisty, there is much I can learn from Oyeyemi, if only by studying her writing.
And this is where I think all of us novice, would-be writers, and old can benefit.
Oyeyemi says of of her writing process, “You’re just making stuff up for hours at a time. When you first have an idea, you think, ‘Yeah! This is going to be an awesome story!…But if you want the story to be as real and true as possible, you have to be in it, even when not-good-things are happening. You have to force them to happen, and you have to really feel and experience it.”
Ben Machell of the London Times who interviewed Oyeyemi says in review of her style of writing and, “White is for the Witching“, “What does emerge, as with her other books, is a sense that she has immersed herself in every moment detailed.”
And isn’t this what every writer and would-be author strives for, prescient, and tantalizing detail.
Oft-times to achieve sparkling detail we must let go. I’m wondering if reading of the macabre, stepping outside my usual genre of Victorian mysteries and family dramas would not help me do so.
I’ll read White is for the Witching and let you know.
Helen Oyeyemi is also the author of The Opposite House and The Icarus Girl.
How do you expand your consciousness as a writer?
How often do you read outside the genre in which you write or prefer to read?