Customer Reviews

Prozac Highway

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I devoured it in an evening, and it has stayed with me for months. It survived a re-read admirably.

The story transports the reader into the chaos that really is madness. A soft and encroaching madness that consumes the reader as it devours Jam, the main character.

Oh yeah, Jam has an "edge"... an edge that cuts through the haze of internal disequilibrium and external expectations. She's complex, she's interesting, and she's accessible.

The mingling of the "real world" and Internet paths are brilliant. Any member of an Internet forum has been there, and it's nice to see it translated so adeptly into one of those paper thingees -- oh yeah, a book.

This book captures what it is to be mentally ill. It is told from the first person viewpoint of a woman who is descending into irrationality. It is painfully accurate in the subtle ways that the irrationality of a mental illness can take over the psyche of an individual. It is more than a self-help or a true experience book though. It is true work of art that captures the reality of the sufferer of mental illness. I have seen it written that the sufferes of mental illness have just a differenr way of looking at reality and that this way may be in its own way more accurate than the normal population. This book to its merit shows the falsity of this idea.

I loved this book. It wasn't too light or too dark - didn't exaggerate anything. Everything was completely told how it is as far as mental illness goes... and medication as well.
I also loved Jam's character... a fortysomething "hardcore lesbian performance artist" who spends all her free time online, except for when her friend Roz forces her to go to the doctor. She makes up dialogue and relationships for characters in the RPG games she downloads and plays and talks to the ashes... that she cleans for's lover (and they talk back).
I laughed and I cried and read it fairly quickly, just because I couldn't put it down.
However, when it ended, I had no closure. There are some books that are succesful in leaving the endings open, and this is not one of them. There were too many loose ends that hadn't even started tying themselves up.
I'm gonna look for more books by this author though. She has amazing talent and maybe something else she wrote has an ending :)

This book is an inspiration. Blackbridge keeps us grounded while taking us into a series of what-the-hell-is-this worlds: a lesbian cleaning lady performance artist living in Vancouver, B.C.? Then she brings in the mental-illness aspect, and in the hands of a less skilled writer this could become some sort of weighty, dull treatise. But not Blackbridge. This story remains true and funny until the very end. Highly, highly recommended.

Something tells me this might not be the author's real name! : - )

While the book is listed as a novel, it definitely reads as if based on the author's real life experiences.

Told in first person narrative, except for occasional moments of third person reference. Jam is a young lesbian woman dealing with mental illness, her own; and the people with whom she comes in contact via the Internet at a site called ThisIsCrazy.

The author's point seems to be that many anti-psychotic drugs, and drugs for depression, etc., have such horrible side effects, and are so dangerous to take, a person prefers the hopelessness of being mentally ill to taking them.

I personally have not been down this particular road, so could not relate to some of what was happening with Jam.

She seems to have low self-esteem, depression and self-defeating behavior patterns.

She definitely IS in serious trouble mentally speaking. She has difficulty even getting out of bed or getting to the cleaning jobs she does. She wears the same clothes for weeks (perhaps months) at a time, even sleeping in them. She cannot bring herself to even wash or brush her hair.

I couldn't understand why she was unable to take those steps.

She and her acquaintances on the net seem to do (or not do) things with unclear motivations, at least unclear to me.

As seems to be the usual case with mentally ill persons, this book also shows mentally ill people to be distrusting and non-co-operative with the Doctors who try to help them.

The book was interesting, but disappointing in that it is totally non-conclusive.