The Dark Side of Innocence
Growing Up Bipolar
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Killing yourself at any age is a seriously tricky business. But when I was seven, the odds felt insurmountable.”
As a young girl, Terri Cheney’s life looked perfect. Her family lived in a lovely house in a tranquil Los Angeles suburb where the geraniums never once failed to bloom. She was pretty and smart, an academic superstar and popular cheerleader whose father doted on her. But starting with her first suicide attempt at age seven, it was clear that her inner world was anything but perfect.
“There’s something wrong with her,” her mother would whisper, her voice quivering on the edge of despair. And indeed there was, although no one had a name for it yet. Hostage to her roller-coaster moods, Terri veered from easy A-pluses to total paralysis, from bouts of obsessive hypersexuality to episodes of alcoholic abandon that nearly cost her her life. Throughout Terri’s chaotic early years, nothing was certain from day to day except this: whatever was so deeply wrong with her must be kept a secret.
Thirty years later, Terri wrote Manic, a harrowing memoir that revealed her adult struggle with bipolar disorder. It became an instant New York Times bestseller and received passionate critical acclaim. But it didn’t tell the whole story. The mystery of Terri’s childhood remained untouched— too troubling, too painful to fathom. The Dark Side of Innocence explores those tumultuous formative years, finally shattering Terri’s well-guarded secret. With vivid intensity, it blends a pitch-perfect childlike voice with keen adult observation. The Dark Side of Innocence provides a heart-rending, groundbreaking insider’s look into the fascinating and frightening world of childhood bipolar disorder, an illness that affects a staggering one million children. This poignant and compelling story of Terri’s journey from disaster and despair to hope and survival will serve as an informative and eye-opening tale for those who would trust a flawless facade.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It wasn't until 1994, when Cheney was 34 years old, that she learned the correct name for what she called the Black Beast, the destructive force that ruled her life. Following her diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Cheney wrote a widely acclaimed account (Manic: A Memoir) of her struggle to make a life for herself while coping with the disease. What she had not anticipated were the thousands of e-mails from parents of bipolar children asking, "What was your childhood like?" This narrative eloquently and intelligently answers this question. Beginning with the jarring account of her first suicide attempt at seven, Cheney then recounts her chaotic adolescence and troubled family life in California, through her departure for college at Vassar. Intelligent and popular, Cheney struggled daily to keep her life on track and her inner life hidden, in a family which kept plenty of secrets: "I was so different inside from the way I looked, I was practically two separate people." Citing the necessity of early intervention to understanding and controlling the disease, Cheney urges parents to listen, learn, read, and discover all they can about their child's problem. Her story is a sound first step toward understanding your child's pain and finding solutions.
Customer Reviews
Charming and Insightful
A rare look into the mind of a person with mental illness. Ms. Cheney puts her thoughts together in a poetic, impressionistic way, which allows it to reach deeply into the soul. Even though her views can be extreme, much of the book is reflective rather than story-driven, making her like a female version of Tucker Max. Male readers might wish she would fall off the wagon and go get into some more trouble, so she could have more stories to tell. (Sorry, Terri, but if you get to tell the truth, so do your readers). If only there were some way for her to experience extreme situations, so she could write about them, without putting herself in danger. Inexorably, though, it's that edgy danger that readers crave.