Ann Morgan - Beside Myself

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A brilliant, spellbinding portrait

I thought this was an excellent book.  It wasn't at all what I expected, but it turned out to be brilliantly gripping, illuminating and disturbing. It has important things to say about identity, compassion and mental illness.

I thought Beside Myself was going to be yet another variation on the old Identical Twins trope in thrillers, but it's actually an acute and powerful portrait of Helen, a troubled young girl whose identity is stripped from her, and her subsequent life as she develops bipolar disorder.  It is told in two time-frames as we alternate between the voice of the young Helen as she grows up and "goes off the rails" and the Helen of the present day, whom we meet when she has reached rock-bottom: addicted to alcohol, depressed, hearing voices and living in hand-to-mouth squalor.  It doesn't sound alluring, and it's often not an easy read but it's exceptionally well done; I found it absolutely spellbinding much of the time.

Ann Morgan gets Helen's voice absolutely right, I think, and her portrayal of the rebellious girl as she grows up struggling with the loss of her true identity and the development of her mental illness is quite remarkable.  Helen behaves abominably much of the time, and yet we understand and almost sympathise with her as she suffers and is misunderstood or ignored by those from whom she needs help.  Morgan creates a superbly believable cast of characters around Helen, most notably her mother who just wants everything to be nice and respectable and who has no time for "weakness," which to her includes any need for emotional support  There are some quite heartbreaking scenes between her and Helen, and many other parts of the book are just as good.

It's not perfect.  We get no explanation of how Helen's twin Ellie suddenly manages to lose her behavioural and learning difficulties and take on Helen's persona and there are a couple of coincidences too many for comfort, for example.  Nevertheless, I found the whole thing so well done and so insightful and gripping that none of that bothered me much.  There have been some very, very fine novels about mental illness recently; this may not be in quite the same league as Nathan Filer's The Shock Of The Fall, but it's certainly close.  I think it and stands with The Shock Of The Fall and books like The Mirror World Of Melody Black (Gavin Extence) and Am I Normal Yet? (Holly Bourne) as excellent, unflinching, compassionate and utterly involving explorations of the world of people with mental illness, and of how the rest of the world treats them.

I am very grateful to the publishers and to Netgalley for sending me a free ARC.  I think this is exceptionally good and I can recommend it very warmly.