Most of Craig’s problems are caused by pressure to succeed, or more accurately, pressure not to fail: He scoots by in school, doing his homework on the morning train, but he’s just barely getting by and he feels dwarfed by the accomplishments of his classmates. Almost every day he comes home, looks at his assignments, gives up, and goes to his friend Aaron’s house to smoke weed and watch movies. He studies extremely hard to get into a school that turns out to require too much of him. While in the hospital, he makes some friends, rediscovers art, loses one girl and gains another, and settles on a new plan for his life moving forward.Ĭraig is the type of person who tries to appear cool to compensate for an inner storm of anxiety. He sees a self-help book on his mother’s bookshelf and following its advice, he decides to check himself in to a hospital. One day, he decides he’s cured, stops taking his medication, and suffers a mental breakdown. He stops being able to eat, and is put on medication for depression. The book tells the story of a fictional teenage protagonist, Craig Gilner, who is fifteen years old and in his freshman year at a high-pressure pre-professional high school. It’s Kind of a Funny Story is not technically a memoir, although Ned Vizzini based it on his experience in a short-term-stay mental hospital when he was twenty-three years old. Reason 5: Schadenfreude – the pleasure of knowing that someone else has it worse than you. Reason 4: By their very nature they require the writer to dig deep, be honest, and hold nothing back, and consequently by the end you feel like you know the protagonist almost as well as you know yourself. Reason 3: They have the most interesting, unique, and mysterious side characters (I will never forget the chicken lady from Girl, Interrupted… *shudder*). You get to follow the protagonist as they grapple with their issues and see where they went wrong and what helped them get better.
Reason 2: They provide insights into how to deal with mental illness. It’s comforting if you have a mental illness (or even if you just get moody sometimes) to know that someone else has had the same experiences.
Mental-health memoirs are my guilty-pleasure reading for 5 reasons:
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