Review By Harsimran Kaur

Rating: 4/5

The ‘mad synchronicity’ levels up every day; trust me! Going insane in the already mentally wrecked world questions the toxity around, the very gelid responses to the ‘muddled me’, and to feel like a ‘boring fish’ riding in vain by the high falutin. Bryony Gordon, author of the book ‘Mad Woman’ sails with her own prejudices and judgments to deal with her mental illness all these years. We could be one of her in the anachronistic tide of anxieties and depression; lest we fail to recognize the antagonistic inside us. Not to forget, many women scourge at the soporific mad-hunt, however its put to sleep in case the troubled waters inch closer destroying the existential sanity.

• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder comes as a de trop to recycle the detritus collecting in the brain. It obliges, “give me any name but come what may, I don’t lose the discipline to spoil you. I marvel at the ability to make your actions discretionary, albeit dogged in the dewlap of misadventures.”
• Addiction makes a space in the already clouded brain! An importune profligate nut coursing through, “you regard me as discourteous and discreditable to make you fall in slumber? Sorry, if I make you look like a bone-shaker but I thoroughly enjoy the raffish rodomontade that plays insitu. I like being the implacable beast; ill-disposed and ill-advised hobnobbing in your pullulating distress.”    
• Notoriety laughs a riot in the stomach; the binge eating disorder is not a solace but an imprecation, “I come as a comeuppance for your neglect of healthy food. No matter how conceited you think of me, I can drive you mad in certitude of chastened food habits.”

Capitulating to a misgoverned mind inflicted with OCD, Alcoholism, Addictions, Bulimia or Binge Eating Disorder is an answer to the social or cultural consanguinity or is it a compulsion to live within a matrix that is convincing enough to let the ‘drama’ roll in? Bryony Gordon, who has been paramount in driving the mental health awareness and creating a network, ‘Mental Health Mates’, talks about in the book of her precocious stage of OCD at the age of twelve and her relentless squall to beat alcoholism. The book is truthful and a probable mea culpa from Bryony of all the slugfest life has thrown to her.

A rich soliloquy awaits the reader; the ‘fridge’ in sotto voice is ready to offer the binge-blarney’—of course! Bryony is obliged. The Chorizo from Sainsbury is dauntless to hang around the tongue for long, and the unrestrained ‘Frank Furtesim’ fighting the devil inside.   

The spirits often fall bleak & bleary; the superficial existence arriving at crossroads in propinquity to shame and regret. The evanescence of life comes crawling; we hurriedly pick up the bits that profess to be palliative. ‘I am drowning, help someone’! – A clarion call from the mind made mad, and then the drama unfolds,

‘To be perfect in the not so perfect world’! The phantasmagoria seems real, the maddening heightened to preserve the sine qua non.

‘Mad Woman’ is about Bryony Gordon; the forbidden intruding in reality; the impressionistic colliding with the sangfroid, and finally the salutary putting an end to the saturnine. It all starts at the age of twelve; schismatic OCD creating an unending fear of contracting AIDS or being impregnated by an alien. Relapses are fought with binge eating as if the cumulonimbus cloud grieves its own thunder.

It is perhaps the maudlin magnified for Bryony to get over alcoholism and other addictive behaviors. One day, the coarse veins subdue in their malfeasance to be declined for alcohol for a long time; Bryony finds relief! However, the serrated saw has more to edge; what follows is Bulimia and Binge Eating Disorder. Jerith, the OCD slanderous devil who perches on her mind to validate her obsessive thoughts and compulsions could be a ‘James’ for you; every instinct deserves an appellation, doesn’t it?

What mind is this? Is it a mad house that acts as a scupper or is a soi-distant dystopian refuge that collects the smallest of conditioning as a threat? Or is all this made-up or merely the perceptions differ from others? Can arguable thoughts be presented in normalcy, and of not why it always falls as an enfant terrible? Bryony Gordon is still in hold of the implications and impulses that her mental illness prey on, but one is set to believe that she is not ‘mad’ as the cluster of minds are in a make-believe palaver.

All along, prejudices don’t leave Bryony. Her menstrual occupancy knocks out the insanity in her to opt for hysterectomy incase the ‘Hormone Replacement Therapy’ or ‘IVS’ fail to comply decency. The ‘mad trail’ from meeting the GP to scanning the conceited lungs and the fluttering paroxysms of the heart; every bit feels to run away from the insane prescriptive megalomania to find sanity, which the mind hordes in abundance.

‘Mad Woman’ weaves a chiaroscuro of the ‘prevalent’ and the ‘presumable’. The mind capable of incendiary thoughts and panic rebuttals also shares the éclat of re-inventing an attitude to defy what seems ambiguous and accepting the reality.

Bryony finds a narrow escape through the small voice,

“We have reached the point, through divorce or menopause or violence or addiction, or whatever else it is that has woken up the Still Small Voice and we have decided we can no longer do this. WE can no longer abandon our wants and our needs and our desires on a daily basis in order to please a society that has no interest whatsoever in pleasing us.”