Given what life can bring, it's a wonder we're not all crazy.

Again courtesy of Sue, I have recently finished You Are not a Stranger Here. It is a collection of short stories with the running theme of mental illness. Might not be for everyone (!!) but I definitely enjoyed it. The characters' problems rum the gamut: acute to chronic, depression, grief, schizophrenia, manic.

I especially loved the inside view of a manic depressive's manic state. It puts my good days / bad days cycle to shame! I can have a few days of what I would consider amazing productivity, but they are usually followed by a couple days with little direction or focus. I figure it all evens out. And if I get four good days to two bad days, maybe I am ahead. But this guy gets more done in one 24-hour manic state than I could dream of in a month. Or maybe the key is that he gets more things half-done, then crashes. Anyway, a look into this kind of life definitely takes the edge off the guilt I feel when I'm in the middle of one of my unfocused days.

I can't even remember why I picked this book up in the library, but I'm quite glad I did. This collection of nine short stories is really good, although it tends towards subject matter of death/suicide/mental illness which was a little frustrating to me. I think every story in the collection had a least some mention of one of the three above, and it was just a little disappointing not to have some more variety.

That said, that stories were great, the characters vivid even in a short time, the plots interesting and new. I particularly enjoyed the first and last stories in the book, the former from the perspective of a cantankerous and unstable self-proclaimed inventor, the latter a fragile depiction of the friendship between an elderly woman and a teen-aged boy.

Great book. Really strong characters and really strong prose. Some of these stories are unlike anything I've read. They're pretty dark, almost Gothic at times, and basically every one of them fucked me up for the whole day. I'm assuming Adam Haslett has depression, or has at least dealt with it at some point in his life: He just does too good a job of making you feel it to not have experienced it himself. In one form or another I think it's the one thing in common across all these stories. Would highly recommend this, especially if you like short story books. Officially Big Nate approved.

Well written stories about mental illness, but Haslett (with a couple exceptions) seems to treat characters as vessels of mental illness rather than people who have these diseases. As a result, the characters are somewhat flat (but this may be more of a function of short story format than anything else). Still, good read.

Not quite as good as his novel, imagine me gone, but, regardless, I continue to be impressed by his capacity for and understanding of mental health. He writes each story as if he’s lived the experiences of his characters. I especially loved the final story, “the volunteer.” The combination of perspective was heart wrenching, especially the way in which Mrs. Maynard applied meaning to all her situations.

These are powerful stories. I wanted to read them all at once, but had to stop to catch my breath. The language and the characters drew me in every time, and the range of the collection is wide. Loved it!

These stories are well-executed, realistic portrayals of characters suffering from mental illness, but it's pretty damn punishing to go through each of these characters' personal pains story after story. This may just be my own sensibility as a reader, but I was more engaged with the handful of supposedly normal protagonists--the ones who didn't require medication necessarily, but who experienced the everyday neuroses and crippling insecurities that are just capable of ruining our lives. The young boys from "Divination" and "The Volunteer" were more interesting to me than the adults who'd been rendered incapable of carrying out their lives by mental illness. The adults were merely sad. The kids provided more insight into how sadness can plant itself in the brain and germinate over a lifetime.

The writing felt only adequate, but maybe that's because I just finished reading Ben Hale and Colson Whitehead. Almost anyone's else prose would seem pedestrian next to those guys.

Anyway, if you want to dive into the heads of some fucked-up people, this collection is for you. But don't read it if you'd rather not be dragged down to a bad place.