prettyrain's Full Review: Persimmon Blackbridge - Prozac Highway: A Novel
In the novel "Prozac Highway," Persimmon Blackbridge shows us up close life on and off the internet for someone with a mental illness, and how the two worlds can work together, against each other or collide, but never quite meet.
She explains how the net creates a place that is in many ways safe to connect and get support -- no one knows who you really are, you don't have to face any of the other people in your real life and they understand. Usenet, email and discussion boards provide an ideal escape for those who are alone and feel misunderstood.
This book explores one woman's (Jam's) experience with mental illness, life, love, work, art and the internet. It's told in the first-person and is so real you're certain that Blackbridge understands all of it first-hand. Jam is a fortysomething lesbian living in Vancouver, British Columbia, trying to fight and manage a mental illness.
She works part-time as a cleaning woman, hears voices, works on performance art projects and productions, tries to deal with mental health professionals, has some bad luck with medications, a past relationship that haunts her, and finds some solace (although some stress and new difficulties) in an internet community.
The book reads as if you are inside Jam's head and includes some flashbacks to when she first had strange symptoms and to the earlier relationship. The emails from the "thisiscrazy" list are incredibly real, as is the description of Jam's feelings for a new girl, fruitbat, on the list. The concern Jam feels for fruitbat, and the expressions of their feelings for one another, accurately demonstrate how quickly a net relationship can escalate, and how intense it may become.
One of the side-stories involving the list centers around the issue of forced medication. If you haven't thought about this before, you'll see from the other side why a patient would want to refuse medication, even though everyone else thinks it would be best. Because it's dealt with on the list though, and again in simple narrative, it never comes off as preachy or as if the book has an agenda. The issue is one people talk about, so it seems quite natural that it would show up on the list.
The story is real, moving, and worth reading more than once -- the way you'd read a letter (or an email) from a friend over and over. The language is simple but the story is complex, the characters well-developed (you could probably figure out which emails were from whom halfway through the book), and we also get an interesting peek into other characters' lives as Jam cleans their houses.
"Prozac Highway" was given the Lambda Literary Award, which is sponsored by the Lambda Literary Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting gay and lesbian literature.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.