Customer Reviews

Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I heard the author speak on NPR, picked up the book, and read it straight through. Lovelace is a stunning writer with a stunning story to tell. Yes, it's a memoir about a bipolar family, but finally it's about finding balance, a way to live, whether it's through medication or insight or understanding or forgiveness and gratitude.

David Lovelace does an extraordinary job detailing the experience of growing up in bipolar family. With a poet's sensitivity, a diarist's power of recollection and with a fair amount of humor and love, Lovelace has created a memoir of soaring beauty. It's rare to find a memoir written with such compassion for those around him. Usually there's a lot of victimization and finger-pointing, but Lovelace tackles his family's story with such honesty and appreciation for his family that you can't help but cheer for them along the way.

Unlike most other memoirs about mental illness, Scattershot isn't a complete downer. You finish with hope and laugh quite a bit along the way. I didn't end the book and feel exhausted or sad. I could relate to many of the experiences, since only a few were horrific ordeals.

This is a fast, fun and sometimes harrowing read! If you read the opening chapter, you'll be hooked. As enjoyable as this is, it still chronicles the dissolution of of an entire family to a misunderstood mental illness.

I was trying to explain to my daughter what makes this such an amazing book. There are just so many things. The whole thing is laced with poetic language. The cadence is magical. And I was struck by how brilliantly organized it is. Amid his personal storytelling Lovelace gives historic background and scientific stats and info on the Bipolar condition in a seamless manner. And, the story just keeps going. Some of the scenes are just waiting for the Big Screen. I really could not put it down!

While Scattershot focuses on the heartbreaking story of a family struggling with Bipolar disorder, this is not some pity piece - Lovelace tells the story with sensitivity but no sugar coat, showing everyone's weaknesses and heroism. I feel like I started to understand the reality of being "crazy" at times and knowing it, along with the strange allure of the manic state. Told with humor and a poet's touch, Scattershot is readable - as well as sad, happy, and revealing.

I highly recommend this book. There have been some excellent creative non-fiction autobiographies to come out over the recent years and this rates as one of the very best. I've enjoyed Jonathan Franzen, Jeanette Walls, Haven Kimmel, David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, and Mary Karr and now David Lovelace has moved to the top of my list. Scattershot is immediately compelling (a two day read I could not put down) and once you're on his rollercoaster, you don't want to get off. The book is at once literary, well-written, entertaining, educational, harrowing, at times hilarious, poignant, and ultimately triumphant.

Few books I have read recently have made me want to stay home from work so I can continue reading. Scattershot was this kind of book. I read it cover to cover in 2 days and loved it - wishing there was more. Lovelace successfully takes one through the struggles that bipolar disorder wrecks on ones life. But rather than being a dark, depressing read, Lovelace is able to convey such difficulties with quick, sharp humor and intense humility and humanity. Scattershot, a memoir that reads somewhat like David Sedaris, is filled with hilarious observations on human behavior. Of course, the author breaks with Sedaris in his ability to honestly convey the difficult daily struggle that living with such a disease takes on friendship, family, and life goals. A wonderful read that I cannot recommend more.

This story is told with so much heart and humor that you cannot help but care deeply about these people. It is also beautifully written; it is clear that Lovelace is also a gifted poet.

The beginning in some memoirs can be drudgery , waiting for momemtum, but not so with this! I was intrigued immediately, and finished this in two nights. Some of my favorite scenes are in the waiting room, and the MAYBE HYPO manic, and the tender way he described his parents marraige. The 'lost friendhips' brought a sense of sadness for me. Teh role of art in their lives was really well written and interesting to me. I like the way his father was atheist , at one time,and what a burden the ever present ' dogmatic stabilzer' was in their environment. I empathized wholeheartedly with the synapse between being present for his children and wife and being 'stimulated' or clincially euphoric and ' grandiose'.
My best read since The Tender Bar and an Unquiet Mind.



Rebecca Holske

David Lovelace is the eldest sibling in a family he describes as "a textbook example of manic depression's genetic link." He, his mother, father, and brother all suffer from the disorder (also known as bipolar disease), with varying degrees of intensity and control, depending on the extent of their medication at any given time. Their story is told in Scattershot with equal parts tragedy, religion, amusement, and inspiration.

That's right, amusement and inspiration. Lovelace not only isn't ashamed of his illness, he's grateful for the journeys that manic episodes provided. He resisted medication and counseling for much of his early life, due as much to an appreciation of his brain's biochemical hyperkinetic energy as to fear of what he'd seen treatment do to his parents (especially his mother). As he tells it, "That delicate sway, that balance between the ridiculous and the reasonable, between crazy stories and dependable bookkeeping, is something I love, a gift that I've learned from my family and from our disease. We have our adventures, our stories, and visions. It beats television. It beats selling insurance."

Scattershot relates Lovelace's manic, unmedicated adventures in a lyrical and surreal way: penniless and directionless flights of fancy to Mexico, Central and South America, and Belize; working construction while high and crazy; going fishing in Gloucester with his dad in a doomed vessel that required Coast Guard rescue; motorcycle journeys to Colorado ski towns; and communal squatting in New York City in the 1980s. Lovelace's passion and magnetic personality coalesced with his mania to win him friends and attract women, a few of whom he fell in love with on the spot (including wife Roberta, whose courtship is as hilarious as it must have been scary at the time).

The religion and tragedy come from Lovelace's devout parents, who met, worked, and raised their family at a church camp. Richard Lovelace was an ordained Presbyterian minister and church historian who was initially received as a lovable eccentric by his community, especially by the younger folks, who gravitated to his incorporation of modern film and music into his sermons. The problem was, Richard's eccentricity was too often a manifestation of his mental illness, and the former grew deeper and more dangerous as the latter went untreated. He kept his family in cramped quarters of their small home yet gave equal space to his reptile collection. He ultimately stayed in bed with the shades drawn for over a year, having meals brought to him and using a chamber pot. The worst, however, was his inability to care for his wife and sons' conditions, interpreting them as the devil's temptations that had to be overcome on one's own.

Scattershot ends with more of a whimper than a bang, but not without the author facing his demons. Unlike his father, and in spite of feeling that "compared to bipolar's magic, reality seems a raw deal," Lovelace acknowledges that he absolutely needs at least a low dose of lithium, the chemical straitjacket, to keep him on the straight and narrow. It's only the uninformed who argue otherwise: "Such thinking guarantees tragedy for the bipolar... Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang."