The Island House is about two young women with secrets that will change their lives during one summer on Nantucket. Some of it was inspired by my own personal experience. I grew up in Kansas, for example, and I fell in love with a man on Nantucket—and I’ve lived here with him for 32 years. I hope I’ve written a fun summer book and a book that shows no matter how eccentric we are, love and belief in the power of love save the day.
A minor theme in The Island House is bipolar illness, or manic-depression. I wrote about a person who is bipolar because the gene is caught, like a glittering twisted thread, inside my own family’s genes. I wanted to show someone who is brilliant and healthy and successful in spite of being bipolar. I wrote about a complicated, loving, happy family who has learned to deal with a bipolar son/brother. The illness is part of the Vickerey family’s life, and if you’ve read The Island House, you know this family has several “normally eccentric” members. Don’t all families?
I’ve talked to a lot of knowledgeable people, and I’ve done some research. One thing I’m sure of is that being bipolar doesn’t come in a one-size-fits-all condition. The range of how a person’s mind is affected by bipolar illness is wide and varied.
The most significant book about being bipolar is An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. Dr. Jamison is professor of psychiatry and bipolar. Her book is informative, breathtaking, and wise. She also wrote Touched with Fire, Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and the poet Byron were manic-depressive, and she discusses them and many other gifted artists.
Other resources for learning a fraction about this complex illness are The Melancholy Fate of Captain Lewis by Michael Pritchett, a brilliant and impressively researched novel about Meriweather Lewis, who led an expedition across America with William Clark, while suffering from mania and depression. Brandon and the Bipolar Bear is a children’s book for children suffering with bipolar illness. Infinitely Bi-Polar Bear is a movie starring Mark Ruffalo, about a father dealing with bipolar illness. The wonderful essay “I’m 18 and Bipolar and it doesn’t suck as much as you think it does,” by Theresa Gao is in the online blog Medium Daily Digest.
