CROSSOVER

Raised in an upper-middle-class, loving home with two siblings, the young Stevens firmly believed life was good. Although shorter than most of his peers in high school, through relentless training and a fierce competitive spirit, he excelled at basketball. He was elected team captain in his senior year. But severe hallucinations began in his freshman year at college. Clouds in the sky talked to him and turned into a lion, a bunny, and then a king wearing a crown. “I am a king,” he thought. This led to his first confinement in a psychiatric hospital. There would be two more psychotic episodes resulting in hospitalization, until he learned to identify and cope with the triggers for his mania. The author’s forthright prose graphically illustrates his varying states of mind: “I looked up and saw a gorilla with my face on the ceiling fighting a wolf….The wolf ripped my head off and chewed on it. I swallowed with fear.” At the beginning of his candid and absorbing memoir, Stevens delivers a vivid description of a manic escapade, capturing the ferocity of his flights from reality and the strange aftermaths. He was in “a packed pizza shop” and yelled, “Shut the fuck up! I’ve had enough of you all talking behind my back!” When a guy tried to help, the author pushed him back over a table. About 30 men were ready to eject him so he charged “toward the door” and “was met by punches.” But once out on the street, he writes, “I stood up like nothing had happened and went about my day.” Despite his illness, the author displays great self-confidence while discussing his accomplishments during his nonmanic periods, when he could harness his energy and singular focus into productive endeavors. He was a firebrand door-to-door salesman for an office products company, earned “$100,000” playing poker, and became general manager of a fitness club chain and vice president of his brother’s software company—all before the age of 29. This illuminating book should especially appeal to readers coping with bipolar disorder and their families and friends.

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