The Lunatics' Ball

By Jacqueline Doyle

A fearless, personal, and redemptive excavation of how women with mental illness have been stigmatized and abused in the name of treatment throughout history.

"There must have been more of us, hidden from sight, or slipping off the family tree like leaves in autumn, unnoticed." Compelled by grief over the suicide of her beloved aunt and by her own bipolar diagnosis, Jacqueline Doyle set out to discover more about their shared disorder and the ways society has punished women it labels "mad." Her genre-bending collection, The Lunatics' Ball, grew into something larger than she expected: a collective (auto)biography combining her aunt's story and her own with those of more than thirty "lunatic" forebears whose histories have been misrepresented or lost. Some are well known, such as Sylvia Plath, Nina Simone, and Zelda Fitzgerald--the latter who died in a locked room in a mental hospital fire. Others are lesser known, such as Lorina Bulwer, who stitched her story into enormous patchwork tapestries; Violet Gibson, incarcerated in an asylum for decades after attempting to assassinate Mussolini; and the writer Janet Frame, who narrowly escaped a lobotomy. In this fearless work that is equal parts imaginative brilliance and exacting historical inquiry, Doyle expands the boundaries of memoir and creates a new community in the face of stigma and repression.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081426011X
• ISBN13: 9780814260111
• Release Date: March 2027
• Publisher: Mad Creek Books
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.