Rachel Lindsay, RX: A Graphic Memoir
Lindsay’s canny memoir begins at a later point than more traditional diagnosis-to-wellness narratives about bipolar disorder begin, well after treatment commences. Her entry point is vital to Lindsay’s own experience of mental illness, which, she explains, doesn’t necessarily conclude neatly. “Despite the psychiatrist I hadn’t stopped seeing, despite the pills I hadn’t stopped taking, I sat tagged and overmedicated in a new prison...waiting to be corrected to fit someone else’s definition of sanity,” she writes. Her memoir---packed with New York City crowds, pharmaceutical advertisements, and childlike self-portraits– produces the sensation of freefall, a kind of dizzying out-of-body experience. Mania, inscribed as snarled and scribbled looping lines, presses at Linsay’s panels, a menace on the page.