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"I was so preoccupied with the idea of losing my body, it had never occurred to me that I might lose my mind."
"When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip's end, she develops psychosis, a complete break from reality, which causes her to lose all sense of time and place, including what is real and not real. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity.
In this unwaveringly honest, insightful, and often shocking memoir Catherine reconstructs her sense of self, starting with her childhood as the daughter of Korean immigrants, moving through a traumatic past relationship, and on to the early years of her courtship with and marriage to her husband, James. She masterfully interweaves these parts of her past with a vivid, immediate recounting of the days she spent in the ward.
The result is a powerful exploration of psychosis and motherhood, at once intensely personal, yet holding within it a universal experience - of how we love, live and understand ourselves in relation to each other."
- from Storygraph
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The best word I can think of to describe this memoir is honest. Catherine Cho not only shares intimately about her experience with Postpartum Psychosis, but also about her family history and traditions and everything in between. She examines love, motherhood, past relationships, and familial expectations all peppered in between her scenes from the psych ward. What I found most interesting was the pacing of the novel – that you don't get the actual scenes of Catherine's descent into psychosis until the very end. I also liked how, instead of chapters, the book was broken down into lots of short snippets separated by either line or page breaks. It read quickly, and was written in such beautiful prose that I often had to remind myself it was nonfiction – a quality I find in my favorite memoirs.
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Content Warnings: Mental Illness, Psych Ward, Descriptions of Psychosis, Violence, Child Death, Body Horror
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