I. Contested, Doubted, Spurned, Dismissed

Memoir has been with us since at least the time of Augustine’s Confessions, and we are now several decades into the current memoir explosion, but the genre remains firmly at the center of a contentious debate. Similarly, the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder[1]– three conditions that I will variously label “invisible” or “borderline” – is growing at explosive rates; yet despite their increasing commonness, these disorders remain contested, doubted, dismissed, derided. Both the genre of memoir and these disabilities[2] occupy a liminal space, and perhaps because of this, memoir has a very particular role to play in telling the story of these conditions. Memoir inhabits an ambiguous terrain somewhere between fact and fiction (with the question of how much “truth” memoirists owe their readers being one of the most ferociously argued points in the memoir conversation), and borderline disabilities, as one might suppose from the terminology, straddle a no man’s land (or perhaps less pejoratively: a frontier) between the normate and the non-normate.

Unlike people with readily visible disabilities (those using a wheelchair or a prosthesis, for example), people with invisible disabilities are hybrids, a braiding of normate and non-normate identities. Hybridity and liminality are confusing, confounding. Indeed, many in the disabilities community, faced with confusing hybridity and confounding liminality, reject people with these conditions and their claims to impairment. Lennard J. Davis, in his essay, “The End of Identity Politics” (Davis 271) says:

… is Aspberger’s Syndrome or hysteria an impairment or the creation of the folie à deux of the observing physician and the cooperating patient? Is anorexia or ADD an impairment or a disability? Particularly with illnesses that did not exist in the past, the plethora of syndromes and conditions that have sprouted in the hearts and minds of physicians and patients – conditions like attention deficit disorder, fugue states, pseudoneurotic schizophrenia, or borderline psychosis – we have to question the clear line drawn between the socially constructed ‘disability’ and the preexisting and somatic impairment.

In the face of such dismissiveness from one of the leading lights of the academic disability community, it is perhaps the unstable genre of memoir that can best work to tell the stories of people affected by disabilities that are themselves seen as unstable, with unclear definitions and boundaries. So while many medical and psychological clinicians, academics, and journalists have written about these conditions (not to mention parents, siblings, and spouses of those affected), it is memoirs by people with “syndromes and conditions that have sprouted in the hearts and minds of physicians and patients” (Davis 271) that perform a special function. They are a form of bearing witness, a kind of testimony, an attempt to stake an identity claim through a first-person narrative. This paper will focus on three memoirs of invisible disability: Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression; Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind, and Timothy Denevi’s Hyper: A Personal History of ADHD.

II. The Trouble With Definitions: Invisible, Borderline, Sliding Scale, Hybrid

As Justice Potter Stewart famously said of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” But the problem with the conditions under discussion here is exactly one of seeing, of discernibility. Although a person in the throes of a deep depression or a profound anxiety attack or one who is manifesting one of the more pronounced symptoms of ADHD may become visible, these disorders usually operate under the radar; they cannot be seen, most of the time, by most people. Ellen Samuels, in her essay “My Body, My Closet” (Samuels 319), says:

… it behooves us to refocus our endeavors from the visible signs of these identities to their invisible manifestations. The focus on specularity and visible difference that permeats much disability theory creates a dilemma not only for nonvisibly disabled people who wish to enter the conversation but for the overarching concepts of disability and normalization themselves.

If a condition is not visible, it may not rise to the level of “disability,” as Samuels points out, and people with a not-visible condition may be prohibited from staking a claim to membership in the disability community, from entering the disability “conversation,” from assuming a disabled identity. Yet if people such as this feel profoundly not-normal – and Solomon, Stossel, and Denevi all go to great lengths to limn the ways in which they feel “not normal” – they are left standing on a border, waiting for some imaginary customs officer to wave them in one direction or the other. As Samuels notes, “People with nonvisible disabilities not only are marginalized in disability communities but walk an uneasy line between those communities and the dominant culture, often facing significant discrimination because our identities are unrecognized or disbelieved” (Samuels 324).

Complicating the issue even further is the ever-increasing recognition that the brain and the mind are complex entities, that autism is not the only spectrum; we are all, in fact, located somewhere on the spectrum of what might be considered “normal.” As Margaret Price points out in her article “Defining Mental Disability,” “Neurotypical and neurodiverse mark a broader territory than psychiatric discourse: these terms include all whose brains position them as being somehow different from the neurotypical run of the mill” (Price 303).

Although greater recognition of neurodiversity is a positive development, it is also true that awareness of a nuanced spectrum between normate and non-normate makes it increasingly difficult for people with hard-to-define conditions to gain acknowledgment, empathy, or legal accommodation. There is no black-and-white test for depression, anxiety, or ADHD, and the focus on specularity that Samuels mentions doesn’t help identify these individuals. You may know it when you see it when a person is in a wheelchair and “looks” disabled (whatever that may mean), but the eyes don’t have it when it comes to non-visible conditions.

Because we now live in a world where many people are sad, worried, or distracted, it is even harder than it might otherwise be for people with invisible disabilities to achieve credibility. There is much to make us melancholy or anxious – war, disease, a stagnant economy– and the technological devices and screens that are an integral part of contemporary life in the developed world erode our concentration and ability to focus. These realities are part of what people with borderline disabilities must contend with as they attempt to stake a claim to an identity, to carve out an identifiable place on the continuum. The difficulty of this project is articulated by Michael Sandel in The Case Against Perfection when he talks about the philosophical concept of the “sorites paradox” (Sandel 118):

Suppose someone asked you how many grains of wheat constitute a heap? One grain does not, nor two, nor three. The fact that there is no nonarbitrary point when the addition of one more grain will bring a heap into being does not mean that there is no difference between a grain and a heap. Nor does it give us reason to conclude that a grain must be a heap. … Baldness is a classic example. Everyone would agree that a man with only one hair on his head is bald. What number of hairs marks the transition from being bald to having a full head of hair? Although there is no determinate answer to this question, it does not follow that there is no difference between being bald and having a full head of hair.

So too with borderline disabilities: a person who is slightly blue is not the same as Andrew Solomon when he is unable to leave his bed, when he cannot even contemplate a shower; a person with modern-day angst is not the same as Scott Stossel, whose anxiety leads him to soil himself in the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts (of all places); someone whose executive function abilities are lessened by incessant screen time is not identical to Timothy Denevi’s impulsively getting into physical fight after physical fight all throughout his childhood, much to his own bewilderment.

A word about terminology and categories:

Invisible.[3] Because the disabilities or conditions cited here are all psychological/ cognitive/mental/behavioral, they cannot be physically seen, as mentioned above. But there is another way in which they are not-visible: Manifestations are intermittent; there is a temporal aspect to the invisibility. When Andrew Solomon is not in the grip of depression, he presents to the world as an extremely high-functioning person (with several published books to his name and many New York Times bylines). In addition, the disability may rear its head with greater or lesser degrees of severity: Scott Stossel, in addition to recounting catastrophic instances of anxiety (not only the Kennedy soiling incident but the horror of his own wedding, at which he sweated so much he couldn’t see), tells many less dramatic tales. But the fact that they are less dramatic, less obvious, less visible doesn’t make them any less evidence of his anxiety; in other words, the degree of his impairment is at times greater, at other times less severe.

Borderline. The people occupying this border territory, this vague no man’s land, inhabit a gray area between ill and well, abled and disabled. Some might say that because Andrew Solomon has spent time in a mental hospital, he is located on the “ill” side of this hypothetical border, while Timothy Denevi, whose ADHD has affected and diminished his life greatly, who has tried a variety of medications, and who has seen a great many therapists and doctors but who has never been hospitalized, is situated firmly on the “well” (if troubled) side of the border.

Sliding scale. As mentioned above, who among us is not a little bit sad, little bit worried, a little bit disorganized and scattered? But some of us are just a little (or a lot) further along the scale, the timeline, the yardstick of sadness/worry/distraction than the rest. Who is it who gets to decide who slides where on that scale? The purveyors of pharmaceuticals? The creators of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the psychiatrist’s bible? Or we ourselves?

Hybrid. Because people with the disabilities under discussion here are a mix, a mélange of “normal” and “not-normal,” they are true hybrids. A depressive not in a depressed state or an anxious person not in the grip of a panic attack can act, speak, and seem like a normate person; a person with ADHD not outwardly manifesting poor impulse control or obvious hyperactivity (as many with the often disorder do not) will similarly present as a normate. “Depression exists in time,” says Andrew Solomon. “A patient may say that he has spent certain months suffering major depression, but this is a way of imposing a measurement on the immeasurable. All that one can really say for certain is that one has known major depression, and that one does or does not happen to be experiencing it at any given present moment” (Solomon 18). The condition will have left its traces, will be a memory, a sort of ghost in the machine, but for the moment, the person is “normal.”

Because these disabilities cannot be easily seen or detected (invisible); because individuals with one of these conditions are frequently not marked in an obvious way as being disabled (occupying borderline territory); because such people may share characteristics – such as “sad,” “worried,” “disorganized” – with non-disabled people, making it difficult to differentiate the “abled” from the “disabled” (sliding-scale); and because they are made up of braided strands of both normal and not-normal (hybrid), their status as disabled is deeply problematic – disbelieved, doubted, dismissed, made fun of.

III. Memoir: The Perfect Partner

Memoir, as a genre, is as contested as any of the disabilities under discussion here. Many view it as the bastard child of literature, neither wholly fact nor wholly fiction. As with the disabilities described above, something that does not fit clearly into one category or another can be deeply confounding, leading to bitter words. Some critics decry memoir’s “stench of self”; James Wolcott, in a much-quoted Vanity Fair article, talked about creative nonfiction (an umbrella category that includes memoir) as a “sickly transfusion whereby the weakling personal voice of sensitive fiction is inserted into the beery carcass of nonfiction.” The novelist William Gass nastily observed of memoir in the pages of Harper’s Magazine: “But what if we really want the world to watch! Look, Ma, I’m breathing. See me take my initial toddle, use the potty, scratch my sister, win spin the bottle.”

But for fans of memoir, its richness lies precisely in its border-straddling, its category-defiance. A memoir may be more poetic (novelist Michael Ondaatje’s lovely Running in the Family), another more elliptical (Abigail Thomas’ exemplar of the genre, Safekeeping), but both purport to tell a story based on fact. Some memoirists have clear antecedents in journalism, while others unashamedly announce their use of composite characters and invented scenes. Some writers think it perfectly acceptable to follow memory down whatever misleading pathways it wants, while others decry this practice. (André Aciman’s beautiful essay “Rue Delta” traces his two published versions of his last night in Alexandria, Egypt, where he grew up. Each version differed from the other; both differed from what actually happened. Yet each, he says, contained a truth.)

Each memoir navigates the vagaries of memory, decides what kind of truth it wants to tell, with how much adherence to the “facts” (and each memoirist will naturally make different choices). As Patricia Hampl notes in her essay, “Memory and Imagination” (Hampl 34), “A memoirist must acquiesce to selectivity, like any artist. The version we dare to write is the only truth, the only relationship we can have with the past.” And as if in answer to Gass’s “Look, Ma” charge, Hampl says: “True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world” (Hampl 35).

This is exactly what memoir does for ambiguous disabilities like depression, anxiety, and ADHD – it finds, and defines, both a self and a world. In the finely observed incidents of their lives, and their observations of how they have been affected by their conditions, Solomon, Stossel, and Denevi each paint a pointillist portrait of their individual experiences – the inability to move or eat, the trauma of a public lecture, the fractured thought process – hoping, it seems to me, that believability lies in the details. It is as if by bearing witness, by offering public testimony, using the valence of the first person, they are saying: This is a real thing. Don’t dismiss it. This was/is my experience. It’s not nothing. I am not merely sad/worried/ disorganized.

“It is … astonishing but true that no matter what you say about your depression, people don’t really believe you unless you seem acutely depressed as they look at and talk to you,” says Andrew Solomon, discussing his attempt to explain his situation to an unbelieving acquaintance. “I proposed that [depression] had in fact changed and determined the whole rest of my life, but I could tell my words were not getting through. He had never seen me cowering in bed and he couldn’t make any sense of the image” (Solomon 365).

While many memoirs tell a tale in very much the way fiction might, these three books are also making an argument. All three want to compel belief in the reader, as if to say: I might not have a scientific proof or a medical test that this disorder exists, but here, I am offering you myself. For although critics of the memoir form bemoan the solipsistic “I,” there is a siren song to the first person, one to which many readers respond avidly – and that is what these writers are banking on.

IV. Doubling-Down on Hybridity

The memoirs under discussion here are doubly hybrid. They are not only hybrid by virtue of the very fact of their being memoirs (in my view, proud offspring, not bastard child, of fact and fiction) but in addition they each interweave reporting and analysis with their first-person narratives. Solomon moves smoothly from personal anecdote to heavily reported piles of numbers (rates of diagnosis, drug effects and side effects) and case studies (his empathetic portrait of a woman named Angel, far more impaired than Solomon even at his worst, is a masterpiece of compassionate reporting). Stossel fascinatingly blends analysis of anxiety as an idea with a genealogical dig into his own family tree. Denevi, somewhat less deftly than the other two, alternates between his own boyhood story and a history of the changing conceptualization of what is now known as ADHD (the parade of names for this disorder, from minimal brain dysfunction to hyperkinesis to hyperactivity to ADD to ADHD is, by itself, a persuasive illustration of how mutable the medical definitions of these disorders really are).

It is interesting to consider why these writers may have chosen to adopt this double persona. Is it because they fear their personal story won’t be sufficiently entertaining? Or that it won’t advance their argument enough? Given the stigma of doubt often cast on these disabilities, do the writers feel a need to buttress their personal narratives with facts, figures, interviews, histories, analyses, portraits of others ­– to, in effect, adopt the persona of “expert,” of reporter, of analyst; to step back from their own situation and view it from a cool remove. They may be attempting to have it both ways, to situate themselves both within and outside of their experience of disability. But another possibility offers itself: Their move to observe and speak from both perspectives – inside and outside – may simply be an enactment of what it means to have a borderline disability. For these writers are, in actuality, on both the outside and the inside – sometimes more on one side of the borderline, sometimes more on the other.

V. Passing and Coming Out

These writers, and anyone with an invisible disability, has to contend with questions of passing and coming out. Because their conditions are not immediately discernible, they can pass as normate if they so choose. They have the privilege of retaining their privacy when and if they want to, of carefully selecting their moment of disclosure. But they also face the necessity of coming out over and over and over again. Ellen Samuels quotes the African-American writer Toi Derricotte, who is light-skinned: “For several years, I wore my identity like a banner. ‘Hello, I’m Toi Derricotte. I’m black.’ ” Samuels discusses the clumsiness of “claiming identity through speech,” noting that “simply voicing one’s identity in any and all situations is a far-from-perfect solution to the dilemmas presented by invisibility” (Samuels 322).

In one sense, each of these three memoirs can be viewed as a moment of disclosure, a definitive coming-out. Instead of repeatedly, tediously “claiming identity through speech,” Solomon, Stossel, and Denevi can simply hand their memoirs to anyone they happen to meet at a cocktail party, anyone whom they’d like to know their story. Now that they’ve written the book, although it may end up on a remainder table, it is, at least in theory, out there for all to see (even if the disability isn’t). Andrew Solomon talks about his desire to be visible, to be out, to have his condition recognized: “The wish for a more visible illness was, I would later learn, a commonplace among depressives, who often engage in forms of self-mutilation to bring the physical state in line with the mental (Solomon 71).

One of the reasons anyone comes out of the closet is to stake a claim to an identity, to gain membership in what might be called a clan or tribe. People with invisible disabilities, in particular, can find comfort in a support group or membership organization of people with their particular condition or by making common cause with the broader disability rights movement (as Ellen Samuels says of Susan Wendell, who has chronic fatigue syndrome: “She makes a point of identifying herself with the disability community and working for disability rights” [Samuels 321]).

Writing a memoir that functions on at least one level as a coming-out story is a very clear claim to an identity. But it is not undertaken without fear or trepidation. As Scott Stossel says in My Age of Anxiety:

… one concern I’ve had about writing this book is that I’ve subsisted professionally on my ability to project calmness and control; my anxiety makes me conscientious (I’m afraid of screwing things up), and my shame can make me seem poised (I need to hide that I’m anxious). A former colleague once described me as ‘human Xanax’ …. By revealing the fraudulence of my putative calm, am I forfeiting my ability to soothe others and thereby compromising my professional standing? (Stossel 24-25)

VI. The Authentic Self

For people with the invisible or borderline disabilities discussed here, the question of “Who am I?” crops up repeatedly. These writers ask who they would be without their disability, if it is possible to imagine a self with the disability subtracted. And for all the pages and pages spent recounting the negative impact their disorders have had on their lives, they even manage to find positive aspects: Solomon feels that his depression has made him more “generous to other people” (Solomon 440); Stossel believes his anxiety gives him a “social sensitivity that make[s] me more attuned to other people and a more tolerable spouse than I otherwise would be” (Stossel 325).

A contemporary corollary to the “Who am I?” question involves medication. Solomon and Stossel embrace their many and varied medications (while at the same time forthrightly discussing the drawbacks), while Denevi has had a more problematic relationship with his drugs. Solomon and Stossel, like many people with these disabilities, feel that they could not live without medication. But who would they be without it? In the post-Prozac world, there has been a great deal of debate about people whose depression and anxiety drugs make them “better than well” and those who take ADHD medication as a sort of performance enhancement, creating what Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker memorably called “brain gain.”

The act of writing these memoirs serves as what the novelist Rosellen Brown calls a “journey of discovery” for their authors (Root and Steinberg xxvi). In addition to all else these books do, they allow the writers to embark on a quest, to explore, to interrogate the questions of: What is my authentic self? What role does my disorder play in who I am? Who would I be without my medications?

Andrew Solomon, toward the end of The Noonday Demon, with his customary eloquence, finds an answer:

In trying to tease out the depression from the person who is depressed, we throw ourselves into the age-old debate about the boundary between the essential and manufactured. In trying to separate the depression from the person and the treatment from the person, we deconstruct the person into nothingness. … Who is the real me? The real me is a person who lives in a world in which all kinds of manipulations are possible, and who has accepted certain of these manipulations. That is who I am. The ailing me is not a more or less authentic self; the therapized me is not a more or less authentic self (Solomon 430-431).

It is, perhaps, an acceptance of hybridity that Solomon is proposing.

– – –

Works Cited.

Aciman, André. “Rue Delta,” Tell Me True: Memoir, History, and Writing a Life. Eds. Hampl,     Patricia and Elaine Tyler May. St. Paul: Borealis Books, 2008. 203-216. Print.

Davis, Lennard J. “The End of Identity Politics: On Disability as an Unstable Category,” The Disability Studies Reader, Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York and London: Routledge,             2013. 264-277. Print.

Denevi, Timothy. Hyper: A Personal History of ADHD. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.       Print.

Gass, William. “The Art of Self.” Harper’s Magazine. (May 1994): 43-52. Print.

Hampl, Patricia, “Memory and Imagination,” I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory, Ed. Hampl. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. 201-237. Print.

Newtown, George, “The Stench of Self … or not?,” The Tribe Speaks: The Mayborn Tribal         Gathering: Talk About Our Literary Craft, Oct. 13, 2008. Web. 17 Dec., 2014.

Price, Margaret. “Defining Mental Disability,” The Disability Studies Reader, Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. 298-307. Print.

Root, Robert L. and Michael Steinberg, “Introduction: Creative Nonfiction, The Fourth Genre,”   The Fourth Genre, Ed. Root and Steinberg. New York: Longman, 2011. xxiii-xxxvii. Print.

Samuels, Ellen. “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming Out,” The Disability Studies Reader, Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York and London: Routledge,             2013. 316-332. Print.

Sandel, Michael J. The Case Against Perfection. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007. Print.

Solomon, Andrew. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. New York: Scribner, 2014.       Print.

Stossel, Scott. My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind. New     York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Print.

Wolcott, James. “Me, Myself, and I.” Vanity Fair (Oct. 1997): n. pag. Print.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Many manifestations of autism, such as Asperger’s syndrome, could be grouped together with these three conditions, as could obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as conditions of a physical nature, such as chronic fatigue syndrome or stuttering. I selected the three under discussion here because each is represented by a major work of what I will call “hybrid memoir,” and that is my interest.

 

[2] I use the terms “condition,” “disability,” “disorder,” and “impairment” throughout this essay, with the awareness that not all people with these conditions would claim all these labels. “Condition” is the one I prefer, as it seems the most neutral.

[3]Ellen Samuels differentiates between “invisible disability” and “nonvisible disability,” observing that “while the term invisible may be used in a literal sense to signify an unmarked social identity, the metaphor of invisibility has long been used to indicate the marginality or oppression of a social group.” In this essay, I am using the term “invisible” to mean “non-visible” – i.e., not perceivable by the eye – although of course, as Samuels says, the two meanings do intersect (Samuels 329).