“I prefer the term ‘manic depressive,'” David Lovelace tells me. “Just because it sounds better. It means something. It’s got teeth. And it’s got a Hendrix song.” A big laugh follows.
His memoir Scattershot is in part a remarkable look at mental illness—Lovelace, his brother, father and mother have bipolar disorder (his sister does not). It’s also a high-wire display of beautifully crafted prose that ping-pongs across the page with invention and momentum. Lovelace is a familiar face to many a Valley book lover—until last fall, he owned the Montague Bookmill.
“Bipolar illness is the diagnosis du jour. It’s the hip diagnosis right now. Two years ago or three years ago it was ADD, ADHD,” he says. “It’s all over the media.
“People are approaching me like I’m the poster boy for bipolar illness. I just got an email that I’m in USA Today—that fine publication!—in something they’re calling the ‘Mental Illness Roundup.’ You know, I’m ready for that.”
I ask him, “What is a Mental Illness Roundup?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’ll be people in coats with nets.”
His ready guffaws are instantly likeable. And likewise his memoir. A subject this sobering—the book starts with his father experiencing an episode of madness while his mother, ignored in the next room, may well be dying—sounds like a tough read. But it isn’t, at least not in Lovelace’s hands.
“I don’t think I flinched at writing about the pretty humiliating and horrific aspects of the illness. But in a lot of ways I’m proud to have survived it. I’m proud to& I won’t say I’m proud to have it. But I’m proud of my experiences. Even when I fucked up, I’m proud of it. I’m not making excuses for that. It is what it is. It says on the book jacket something about how I learned to embrace my illness. I don’t think that’s quite accurate. It’s more like an awkward hug.”
Scattershot is full of unexpected turns. Not turns to madness, necessarily—often, it’s just plain eccentricity. Lovelace’s father, a Presbyterian minister and later an academic, holed up in his church office, barricaded the door and cranked the heat for the snakes and lizards he would bring to work for the day. His grandmother lived in a house whose basement was always flooding, causing mold problems, so she went with a teal green color scheme in every room.
Maybe such things were madness. But they’re compelling in ways that have nothing to do with mental illness. They’re also a great read; Lovelace threads the needle with such moments, never descending for long into despair even when horrific events unfold. His memoir succeeds in telling a story of immense difficulty and sadness, but, as with Lovelace himself, laughter and deft turns of phrase are never far away.
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Lovelace’s parents met at Bible camp, and his story is complicated by the intersection of a fundamentalist brand of spirituality with the cycles of his family’s mental illness.
“I’ve always wondered about fundamentalism and mental illness,” I tell Lovelace, “and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. I’m a preacher’s son, too—these are my people. What I mean is, there was a strange sort of scary edge there, like with the people who added up all the numbers in a Bible passage to predict the date of the Rapture.”
Lovelace is quick to say he’s not at all bashing religion as “mentally ill,” just that certain parallels exist. “The evangelical conversion experience is perfect for bipolar people,” Lovelace says. “Because the first thing that’s gotta happen is that you go into the slough of despond, and you’re supposed to be convicted of your damnation and your own unworthiness, and that whole ‘Christ in the desert’ thing. You want to just toss yourself off a peak.
“That hits first, and then there’s this ecstatic vision, the actual conversion when you’re flooded with the Holy Ghost. And even as far back as the 17th century, with Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, people were falling down in the aisles and convulsing and he had to explain why that was going on. That’s a whole other book.”
Lovelace seems to see things sort of the other way around, though. It’s more that bipolar disorder relates to the spiritual. “That experience of hell, and then all of a sudden this mystical union with God—that’s bipolar, in a sense. There’s a connection,” he says. “So when I was growing up and I had those horrible depressions, those were spiritualized in my family. It was ‘dark night of the soul.’ We’ll pray for you, but it’s a good thing. Ultimately, you’re being tested and tried. I think that’s still going on in the church.
“It’s supposed to happen again and again—you recommit yourself to Christ. You’ve got to backslide—I mean, that’s the fun part. But I do think there’s no question there’s a spiritual component to the illness as well. A true clinical depression is about as close as you can get to hell, topside. You experience that. And then, if you have a hardcore manic psychotic episode, you’re going to think you’re God.
“I say in the book, I felt like a god, and I was scared shitless. That’s pretty accurate. That’s what happens. Maybe it’s unnatural and maybe it’s a disease, but that stretching of your mind to those extremes, the hell and the heaven, it expands you. The question of what’s separating the delusions from the reality—that’s almost beside the point. The point I’m making is that you’re pulled to extremes, and you remember those extremes.”
“But I don’t think I was God—I mean, I just want to make that clear!” He laughs. “I don’t want that job.”
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Lovelace is also a poet, and he sees balancing creativity and his illness as an important tension. “I don’t want to say I feel blessed or lucky to have this illness, but there is a creative core to it that you can’t discount. That ability to free associate—that’s huge in poetry. That’s the bread and butter of poets. That’s something that your mind skips out of joint and starts to do, and I think you can still access that when you’re stable and sane.
“I guess one of the serious points of my book is that you can take lithium, in my case, and you can achieve that balance between creativity and wellness. You can take the medicine, and you’re not snuffing out your muse. The disease is among the most deadly of mental illnesses. Without medication, without treatment, one out of five manic depressives kills themselves. But it’s also the most treatable. Lithium works. It’s just a question of achieving that balance so you’re not a zombie.
“I’ve been writing poetry for 25 years. And I’ve been writing good poetry for—I don’t know—maybe 10? But a lot of that poetry has to do with approaching painful stuff and doing it in an oblique way, through imagery and whatnot. So when that horrific scene happens in the first chapter, when my mother’s hospitalized and my dad’s out of his mind, I wrote a long poem about that and read it at a reading. This was really an emotional thing for me, and it was really gut-wrenching to read it—and I looked up and everybody was giving that sort of polite, poetry-reading look, like, ‘I’m not really sure what’s going on, but it’s… good.’
“I realized I’ve got to go at this direct. So then I went home and I wrote the first chapter, just straight-out. And I read it a month later at the same bar, and it was a totally different reaction. People were gasping. That’s when I decided to keep going.”
Just after Lovelace sold the Bookmill, his memoir was accepted for publication. A massive writing effort got underway, and, not even six months later, the book was done. Fortunately, he didn’t find the transition from poetry to prose overly problematic.
“I don’t want to say it was easy. But& it was easy,” he tells me. “I didn’t write any prose—all I wrote was letters, and I’m a big letter writer. When I owned the Bookmill, I wrote these great incendiary business letters and stuff. They didn’t do any good, but they were fun to write. I didn’t write much prose, so when I shifted gears, it was really liberating to just write. When you do that when you’re writing poetry, you quickly run amok.
“It was pretty intense. I worked every day for four months. And then four days before it was done, there was another medical emergency with my parents and it started all over again. It was pretty intense. I was in the middle of it again. The disease is a cycle. It returns.”
I ask him if it was hard to put his life on the page. “It was much harder to put my parents on the page,” he says. “That was really difficult, because at first I thought, the first chapter aside, I could pretty much stick to my spiel, my story, and it quickly became apparent that it was about the family and all the dynamics that occurred around this disease. So in a sense I drafted the rest of my family into my own little psychodrama project.
“My brother and sister, at first they were a little nervous, but then they loved it. They got right into it and they helped me out a lot. They gave me a lot of perspectives. And my dad was pretty forthcoming with anecdotes at the beginning of the process, but when he realized it was more and more about the disease, he got pretty anxious about it. As it stands now, I don’t think he’s read it. He says, ‘I’m proud of you. I’m glad you got a book out there.’ And that’s sort of the end of the conversation, and we move on to other things.
“In a sense that’s how it was with my family. You know, ‘Jonathan was hospitalized, but he’s better now, he’s out, and we’ll just move on.'”
“We never worked through the immense implications of mental illness. I guess that’s what I set out to do.”
Lovelace reads from and discusses Scattershot Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 7 p.m. at the University Club at UMass-Amherst. On Saturday, Nov. 1, Lovelace participates in a panel discussion at 9:45 a.m. at the Write Angles Conference at Mount Holyoke College. And on Dec. 16 at 7 p.m., he reads from Scattershot at the Oddysey Bookshop in South Hadley.