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.

BRIGHT OBJECTS, shiny start to a promising new career

BRIGHT OBJECTS
RUBY TODD
Simon & Schuster
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A young widow grapples with the arrival of a once-in-a-lifetime comet and its tumultuous consequences, in a debut novel that blends mystery, astronomy, and romance, perfect for fans of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands.

Sylvia Knight is losing hope that the person who killed her husband will ever face justice. Since the night of the hit-and-run, her world has been shrouded in hazy darkness—until she meets Theo St. John, the discoverer of a rare comet soon to be visible to the naked eye.

As the comet begins to brighten, Sylvia wonders what the apparition might signify. She is soon drawn into the orbit of local mystic Joseph Evans, who believes the comet’s arrival is nothing short of a divine message. Finding herself caught between two conflicting perspectives of this celestial phenomenon, she struggles to define for herself where the reality lies. As the comet grows in the sky, her town slowly descends further and further into a fervor over its impending apex, and Sylvia’s quest to uncover her husband’s killer will push her and those around her to the furthest reaches of their very lives.

A novel about the search for meaning in a bewildering world, the loyalty of love, and the dangerous lengths people go to in pursuit of obsession, Bright Objects is a luminous, masterfully crafted literary thriller.

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My Review: A debut novel from a very accomplished author, one whose best gift is the deft touch of characterization. I felt very connected to Sylvia from the get-go, her fuddled and bewildered survivor's guilt, her unostentatious revenge-seeking against the one responsible for her loss, and her deep but unwilling fascination with a charismatic local cult leader.

The lovely patterns Author Todd weaves among these strands, spinning her threads from the ever-renewed internal structures of loss, guilt, sadness, and outrage, don't sag or drop. They're sometimes not as harmoniously tinted as a veteran writer might choose...the mother-in-law in particular is rather paler than I'd expected, Theo the astronomer a bit too intense...but these are quibbles. Not a line out of place, not a word (even when a not-American word crops up) wasted or obscured.

The lack of a full fifth star on my rating isn't because of some sense of disappointment. I got what I wanted. The plot...revenge-driven widow struggles to cope with her loss and her survivor guilt will catch me in its web every time...is consistent, is finished with an appropriate, yet unexpected, ending. What bothered me, and this is really a very *me* thing to be tangled up in, was the comet. A comet, one on a path to get this close to Earth, is not going to go undetected for very long. We're motivated, since Shoemaker-Levy 9 smacked Jupiter so very hard in 1994, to go looking for these kinds of objects.

Okay, so that's a half-star lost. A tiny smidgeon of the tarnish on my shiny loving cup of pleasure also traces to Theo and his own warping loss. It's a trope I find painfully Writerly, is the Conjunction of Damaged Souls. Theo's issues were understandably similar to Sylvia's; his response to her darkness was believable. His discovery of her, in Australia, where he happens to be for the confirmation of a career-defining discovery, is what rings false to me. As always I want this kind of other-directed man to exist; I suspect he isn't to be found in a man about to ascend to the heights of his ambitions. I also see the facile characterization of Joseph Evans, and honestly, since he's such a bell-end of a grifter, I just don't care.

Quibbles and crotchets aside, everything Author Todd does in this story fits. The mystery plot, the way it's rooted in the ugliness of revenge, the focus of the two leads on their personal quests, all works as a whole. The manner in which the ending's made manifest felt satisfying to me. I'm struggling with myself not to spoiler it (though I really want to!) because experiencing the event blind is a pleasure enhancer.

Tyro author does a fine job, will most likely do better next time, and very much deserves your treasure and time.