'Madness: A Bipolar Life' casts light on shadows

MINNEAPOLIS — Marya Hornbacher remembers her "endless nights" as a child as young as 4, when she says she first began to show symptoms of bipolar disorder.

"Bam! At 5, 6 o'clock I'm off, I'm ready to roll. And the world is shutting down around me and I'm getting more and more frantic because nobody wants to talk," Hornbacher recalls with a laugh, "and nobody else wants to go to the moon that afternoon and nobody else wants to go ice skating in the woods, you know, at 4 a.m."

She would spin out of control, racing around the house until her mother discovered that a late-night bath would calm her. Finally, she says, her parents told her she could do anything she wanted at night, "but you cannot come out of your room and talk to us, because we're going to bed."

Hornbacher, now 34, says those early episodes were the start of a lifelong cycle of mania that culminated in repeated hospitalizations, electroshock treatments and eventually daily medication that stabilizes her mood.

After chronicling her battle with eating disorders in her 1998 memoir "Wasted," Hornbacher tackles her alternating bouts of euphoria and depression in a new book, "Madness: A Bipolar Life." Reviews have been positive, with USA Today saying that as Hornbacher "whips around this roller-coaster ride, her unflinching style keeps us seated firmly beside her."

Writing in a straightforward narrative, Hornbacher fills "Madness" with grim details, such as the time in 1994 she slashed open her left arm while cutting herself as a 20-year-old. She recounts spending sprees, failed romances and her haziness after electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). But she also writes with humor about stuffing a brocade bedspread into a too-small washer during a cleaning frenzy.

Dressed stylishly with her hair dyed red and cut short, Hornbacher appeared upbeat during an interview at the comfortable house she shares with her second husband, Jeff Miller, two miniature dachshunds (Dante and Milton) and two cats (Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot). Thanks to her medication — she takes around 26 pills a day — and basic daily tasks, Hornbacher is at equilibrium "much of the time."

But her impulses — such as to suddenly travel a great distance or go shopping — can trigger a manic episode.