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The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang

Review by Max Casey

‘Weaponized Glamour’: Esmé Weijun Wang’s anti-memoir

A sobering number of schizophrenia memoirs describe the writer being involuntarily detained in an asylum. The history of those with schizophrenia has long been characterised by violent, carceral repression from those seemingly meant to care for them. In Elyn Saks’ famous schizophrenia memoir, The Centre Cannot Hold, she describes the experience of being involuntarily committed as such: 

A sound came out of my mouth that I’d never heard before. Half-groan, half-scream, barely human, and pure terror. Then the sound came again, forced from somewhere deep inside my belly and scraping my throat raw. “Noooo,” I shouted. “Stop this, don’t do this to me!” (145). 

In 2019, Taiwanese-American author Esmé Weijun Wang published The Collected Schizophrenias, ostensibly an illness memoir but with a very different approach to Saks’. Wang was also detained in an asylum against her will, and in her memoir she describes the experience as such:

It is hard to convey the horror of being involuntarily committed. First, there’s the terrifying experience of forcibly being put in a small place from which you’re not allowed to leave. You’re also not allowed to know how long you’ll be there, because no one knows how long you’ll be there. You don’t have the things that you love with you: your journal, the bracelet your grandmother gave you, your favourite socks. Your teddy bear. There are no computers. (39)

There’s a very different approach going on here. Saks’ text is visceral – she puts us right in the moment when she is held down against her will and put on a ward. Wang though distances us from the experience; she opens not by dramatizing the event, but with the trite generality of ‘it is hard to convey…’.  The whole section is written in the second person about an elusive ‘you,’ as if this account is a theoretical and not her lived reality. Given the experience described is clearly Wang’s, why not write it in the first person? Why not write ‘I was put in a small place from which I couldn’t leave’? If being involuntary detained is such a terrifying experience, why distance your reader from it? Why not throw it in their face and make them feel it?

In order to answer that question, and to explain what this fascinating schizophrenia memoir is doing, it’s worth thinking about what illness memoirs are for. Why write one and why read one? Scan the critical literature on this and you’ll see a few common answers, mainly revolving around learning to understand oneself, and giving hope that those affected can triumph over their illnesses. The memoir is often framed as a journey of understanding, where the ‘hero’ of the story takes on adversity in order to find themselves, in line with Joseph Campbell’s famous ‘monomyth’ theory. For Campbell, the monomyth or ‘Hero’s Journey’ is a cross-cultural narrative framework where a hero sets out on a journey, faces adversity and returns home changed; it is a common framework for understanding every kind of narrative from memoir writing to Star Wars. Arthur Frank says that illness memoirs “shift the dominant cultural conception of illness away from passivity-the ill person as ‘victim of’ disease and then recipient of care-toward activity. The ill person who turns illness into story transforms fate into experience.” Illness memoir here is about helping patients feel like they have a say in their own lives, that they are not simply victims of circumstance. Critical to this is creating a sense of hope- that within illness one does not simply survive but can thrive. This is integral to the structure of the memoir, which centres overcoming adversity in the pursuit of self-discovery. 

This however does not occur for Wang’s memoir. Wang seems to hold her own experience at a distance and in doing so, comes off as passive and dissociative in her own account. This is not a critique of Wang or her writing, far from it. Rather, this style makes apparent how hollow such imperatives towards becoming the ‘hero’ of one’s story have become in the contemporary world. The illness memoir has been a profound medium for people to tell their stories, be recognized by others, and to advocate for themselves as the bearers of difficult and stigmatized illnesses. At the same time, these texts have always been products of oppressive circumstances and insidious financial incentives. A memoir is able to combat stigma after all only because such stigma exists in the first place. The structure of the illness memoir requires that a writer bear their soul in order to receive a bare minimum of recognition and acknowledgement of their humanity. Illness memoirs also became popular during, and are part of, the ‘misery memoir’ genre, texts that were famed for exploiting traumatic life stories for literary sensationalism. This is not to dismiss the illness memoir as a genre or even the oft-unduly rebuked ‘misery memoir,’ but simply to point out that this setup privileges combatting stigma through an imperative to be emotionally vulnerable to the very people who hold such stigma. Underneath these genre conventions is an insidious requirement from society to the person with schizophrenia: “Ok you can have our recognition and maybe even respect, but first I must understand your life’s most traumatic moments. I must get unparalleled access to your inner turmoil and please also make it readable and not boring or repetitive. It needs to be sad but please don’t make it too sad or I’ll feel sad. At the end I must experience catharsis as you overcome the societal adversity that I am part of.” In this situation then, ‘speaking your truth’ or ‘telling your story’ become buzzwords that conceal a requirement to be readable by those often more in control of your life than you are. 

A difference between many memoirs and Wang’s is how aware and explicit she seems to be of this. She discusses the benefits of being a ‘high functioning’ schizophrenic in terms of being able to hold a job and being able to “pass in the world as normal.” She describes the philosophy of being high functioning by quoting a Chinese poet from the third century BC: “Produce! Get results! Make money! Make friends! Make changes!/Or you will die of despair.” She describes her elaborate self-presentation rituals in detail before meeting doctors, emphasizing her efforts in order to ‘pass’: “If schizophrenia is the domain of the slovenly, I stand outside of its boundaries as a straight-backed ingenue.” These elaborate presentation rituals are so important because they are how Wang manages to live in a world where people with schizophrenia disproportionately face poverty, incarceration or death. These rituals make apparent how appearing ‘normal’ is not just a question of completing a treatment and ‘finding yourself’ but is about learning the right social codes, and being able to present yourself well no matter the circumstance. 

In one essay, Wang gives a talk about her recovery to a group of doctors. While we are not told how Wang feels going into the meeting, she does tell us about what she wore (brown Marc Jacobs dress), her moisturizer and what it smells like (bananas and almonds), and the colour of her lipstick (‘narcotic rouge’). The talk goes well and afterwards one doctor comments that “she was grateful for this reminder that her patients are human too.” This is a startling admission by a doctor. This is a doctor that admits that she often does not even see her own patients with schizophrenia as properly human. Wang sees this change of heart as a victory but an ambiguous one: “When she said this, I was fingering the skirt of my exquisite dress. I’d fooled her, or convinced her. Either way, I knew, was a victory.” It’s worth pausing on this for a second: the doctor admits that she struggles to see her schizophrenic patients as human beings, and Wang can’t decide whether she has convinced the doctor of this, or has ‘fooled her.’ Well which is it? Are people with schizophrenia human or not? 

It is clear from reading the book that Wang does not think that people with schizophrenia are inhuman. Rather, this ambivalence highlights how the way we appear to others is not a ‘natural’ reality. Wang receives respect from this doctor because she is keenly aware of her own self presentation and how that is read by her audience. Her descriptions of her outfits and makeup routine are more than just textual flavoring but part of a deliberate strategy to appear ‘normal’ to her peers. Psychiatrists have described such behavior as “double bookkeeping”: the requirement by people with schizophrenia to keep tabs both on their external, intersubjective world within larger society, and also their own internal world, which can radically diverge during psychotic episodes. For Wang, this is “weaponized glamour,” a term she uses to describe how she uses ostentation to get a leg up in this world. With her weaponized glamour, Wang highlights a sobering truth about recovering from schizophrenia—that, as far as external society is concerned, appearing healthy and normal is far more important than actually being healthy and normal. 

This emphasis on appearances also manifests on the level of writing. Wang’s sentences are clear, concise but riven with implication. There is a disjunction between this lucid, crystalline prose and the horrifying and traumatic encounters that she describes. Whereas most illness memoirs will turn traumatic encounters into scenes that the reader must work through, Wang will transplant trauma into hints, throwaway remarks, or funnel her feelings through the stories of others. Wang will frequently describe her own inner turmoil by discussing famous people, such as the artist Francesca Woodman who committed suicide, as well as Malcoum Tate, a schizophrenic man who was killed by his younger sister. The effect of this can be strangely disquieting. On a surface level the book is easier to digest than most ‘misery memoirs.’ The journalistic prose through which Wang describes traumatic events lets the reader engage with this book in the same way they might scroll past the day’s latest atrocities on their phones. 

At the same time, if one slows down, reads carefully, and really thinks through what is being said then the book’s horror comes to the surface. Wang occasionally suffers from Cotard’s Delusion, the idea that her or the people around her are dead. Wang describes the quick descent into Cotard’s as such: “I…glance at my sewing table as the thought settles over me, fine and gray as soot, that I am dead” (127). There is an uncanniness about describing something as horrifying as Cotard’s with such an elegant metaphor and simile: ‘fine and gray as soot.’ There is nothing accidental about this, and it is a very finely crafted way of bringing forward the horror of what she experiences while also being even a little funny. This writing performs the same kind of ‘weaponized glamor’ for the reader as her outfit and makeup do for her doctors. Rather than the raw style of most illness memoirs that use emotional vulnerability as currency for the circulation of empathy and recognition, Wang makes it clear from the start that this book is a performance and that we are part of her audience. 

It is a catechism of medical activism that ‘You Are Not Your Illness.’ You may have a mental illness, it may affect you horrendously, but you are not it. Underneath this illness is a pristine ‘I’ that must be returned to. This well-meaning attempt to combat the dehumanization of ill people runs aground though at the fact that your illness is fundamentally a part of you. Experiences like a psychotic episode affect the self so deeply that, while it is not a reason to treat someone as lesser, it is fundamentally a part of who they are. Through a traineeship for the Mental Health Association of San Francisco Wang is told that “our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another” (145). Privately though Wang lets us how she truly feels:

There might be something comforting about the notion that there is, deep down, an impeccable self without disorder, and that if I try hard enough, I can reach that unblemished self.
But there may be no impeccable self to reach, and if I continue to struggle towards one, I might go mad in the pursuit. (71)

This search for a self underneath the illness is for Wang not an aspiration but instead its own sort of psychosis, a pursuit primed for incredulous illusions like coherent identity. In this sense, Wang’s memoir is a perfect illness memoir for our time, demonstrating how the best way to be authentic is to show how impossible it is to be ‘authentic.’ We peer behind the curtains to see how this person with schizophrenia is made to act, perform and live in order to avoid societal and social stigma and oppression. This is not a journey to find the self but a story of how a person finds spaces to thrive and live within conditions that for most of her readers would be intolerable. 


Max Casey is PhD Candidate and lecturer in English Literature at Utrecht University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Esmé Weijun Wang. The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). Graywolf Press.  224 pages. More information.