THE MAKE-BELIEVE: A Memoir of Magic and Madness, the long walk back to Reality from toxic fantasyland

THE MAKE-BELIEVE: A Memoir of Magic and Madness
HANNAH MURRAY
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: He sat me down in a chair and he told me, in no uncertain terms, that magic was real.

This is the true story of a spiritual awakening that turned into a mental breakdown. At the age of twenty-seven, an actress joins a wellness organisation and falls in love with its leader. She is sectioned for a psychotic break and diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

The Make-Believe is a deeply personal account of these events. It is a wild ride, a searching attempt for understanding and a call for radical empathy. Lyrical and playful, exploring light and dark, it takes readers on a journey to the edges of reality, to a seductive and dangerous world where magic seems possible.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First things first: the acting career of Author Hannah is not foregrounded. This is not a celebrity BTS tell-all. Game of Thrones happens in the background.

Some of y'all are now gone, largely uninterested in this story; honestly I think that's a good thing because there's no reason to try to interest those seekers in this quest. What makes it a good read is exactly that: Author Hannah is on a quest, a search for...something...but like most of us, she's frustrated by the amorphousness of questing without a target. The goal of any quest is to get somewhere, find something, achieve stuff.

Is it? Should it be?

The cautionary tale of Author Hannah's bilking at the hands of those who purvey certainty ought to put paid to that wrongheadedness. Her eventual psychotic break, leading to a bipolar diagnosis is truly the heart of her story. I'm deeply empathetic with the terror of psychosis because I've been there myself. Nothing on Earth can compare to that terrifying, unmoored awareness of reality being...conditional, absent even, as you try to navigate living without being able to feel the rootedness of touching truth.

There's nothing more comforting in that situation than having certainty gifted to you from outside. The wellness cult Author Hannah found was giving her value for the money they took from her in the form of terra firma, a firm ground to attach her questing mind to. It wasn't honest or real so coming unstuck was inevitable...but her crisis led her to the solidity of a diagnosis that snapped her into focus. The reason for her continuing failures to reach solid ground were finally clear: bipolar disorder clouds every single perception until the sufferer can't see which thoughts are grounded and which are vaporous fantasies.

Author Hannah's telling of her journeys to harbors that end up being whirlpools is harrowing. It's honest...as far as it goes. I'm still not clear how her parents, who come in for plentiful blame, were so dreadful because it's simply told to the reader that they were. Given the results as embodied in Author Hannah herself, I'd say the perception of them as horrific human beings might just be an artifact of her genuine mental illness that she's going to spend a lifetime unraveling and integrating into her ever-developing tapestry of healthy perceptions. An actress of her achievements does not spring from nowhere. It's a question that's unaddressed and it constantly niggled at me as I read.

This is a very sobering walk with a lost soul who found her way back, and would like us to know how, and why, she took it as well as tell us how to come back if we come unmoored too.