What is the date you began writing this memoir and the date when you completed the memoir? Prozac Monologues: A Voice from the Edge is a book within a book. The original manuscript, called simply Prozac Monologues, was written in three weeks, January 23, 2005 through the second week in February that year, most of it in the first week, when I was on vacation in Costa Rica. It was the product of an undiagnosed episode of hypomania.
Over the next four years, my efforts to publish the monologues were unsuccessful. During that time my undiagnosed bipolar disorder and a damaging series of six antidepressants that I took for depression threw me into mixed states and even threatened my life. My mental state deteriorated to the point that I went on disability and then retired.
After correct diagnosis and a few years of working on recovery, I picked the work up again in 2015 and discovered that the manuscript itself contained the evidence of that hypomanic episode that had been missed in 2005. My writing style exhibited the diagnostic criteria of bipolar disorder. I conceived of a framework, alternating each original monologue with another chapter that explained one of the symptoms displayed. I imagined myself on stage, delivering the monologues while another self from the audience, the heckler, kept interrupting to explain what was really going on.
The rewriting proceeded slowly, as did my new pharmacological efforts to treat my bipolar and then my cognitive rehabilitation from that pharmacology. I read a lot of research papers to learn about the neuroscience of bipolar disorder. It took two years to make my way through the 976-page textbook by Goodwin and Jamison, and another two years to figure out how to make the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder sound simple, short, and most important, funny.
https://www.gmeded.com/faculty/fred-goodwin-md
By 2019 I was submitting the science chapters to specialists for comment and the new manuscript for developmental editing. My heckler became Prozac Monologues: A Voice from the Edge, and the book was published in 2020.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/prozac-monologues-willa-goodfellow/1135878986?ean=9781631527319
Where did you do most of your writing for this memoir? And please describe in detail. The monologues were written at my sister’s hotel, the Pato Loco in Playas del Coco, Costa Rica. I wrote on the restaurant’s patio, while I watched the iguanas leaping from the tin roof to the hibiscus bush next to my table. I wrote at the newly installed bar, constructed of white tile, that I had been invited to Costa Rica to bless. I wrote propped up in bed in the wee hours when I couldn’t sleep, until the birds outside my room woke my wife. I wrote in the plane, during the seven hours of the flight time to Costa Rican and back to Iowa. Wherever I was, I wrote and wrote and wrote.
Right: Willa Goodfellow writing in Costa Rica.
Copyright by Willa Goodfellow.
The rest of the book was written in my office in Coco in what we call our little Monopoly house (referring to its size and shape) that my wife and I bought the year after that first vacation. I spend 5-10 weeks there each year. This austere little room with pale green walls contains two small wooden tables that hold our laptops, two office chairs, a dark green couch that doubles as a bed for guests, and a window hung with restful green curtains made from fringed pareos (like sarongs), decorated with leaping dolphins that flutter in the breeze from the air conditioner.
Right: The little Monopoly House.
Copyright by Willa Goodfellow.
What were your writing habits while writing this memoir- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? The monologues were hand-written on a yellow legal pad, or rather, scribbled, filling the pad of paper, front and back, in the margins, and between the lines, whenever my family was not able to tear me away from my task. The eventual cover design of the book makes reference to that original notepad, which I have preserved as an artifact.
Once I learned that I have bipolar and also learned the importance of regular schedule to manage it, my writing has become incredibly disciplined. The aforementioned air conditioner helped, bringing the temperature down to a comfortable 85, while the rest of the house rises each day to 97
. So I had excellent motivation to stay in that austere little room where there was nothing else to do but write.
Copyright by Willa Goodfellow.
I spent two hours at my laptop in the late morning, followed by lunch, shower, and short siesta, followed by a return to the office for coffee and cookie before writing another three hours each afternoon.
Then it was time to walk either the half mile to the beach for a stroll along the sand or the quarter mile to the Pato Loco for happy hour at that restaurant/bar where this whole thing began.
Out of all the specific memories you write about in this memoir, which ONE MEMORY was the most emotional for you to write about? And can you share that specific excerpt with us here? The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer, and please provide page numbers as references. My most emotional memory was of the event that first led me to pack a yellow legal pad in my carry-on when I flew to Costa Rica. There are two versions of it in the book. This more complete version is on pages 1-2:
THE POINT
I pressed the point of my nail file into my thumb. Unmindful of the garage attendant as I passed him, unmindful of the cars in the circular drive in front of my doctor’s office, unmindful of the ice under my feet, I wondered, could I take a nail file with me on the plane to Costa Rica?
January 4, 2005, the TSA was starting to loosen the rules. Yes, you could carry a nail file, but it would be confiscated if they changed their minds next week. And you’d probably not find out until you were at the airport.
Honestly, could a nail file do any damage? For now, I pressed it into my thumb, intending to do my nails while I waited for the doctor, something to channel my fidgeting. I was fidgeting lately.
The automatic doors slid open to receive me, and my brain slid open to receive a thought.
I grab my doctor from behind and press the point of the nail file into her neck.
This was no ordinary thought. I didn’t have this thought. It had me. It was more like a dream and I was inside it. I saw it happen inside my head.
Did anybody else see me do that?
Suddenly the reception area was hostile territory. Well, the receptionist was notoriously hostile. But now the doors were too. They’d opened to receive me, but would they release me if they knew about this thought?
Did they know about this thought?
I didn’t do my nails. I hid the file. I wouldn’t pull it on my doctor anyway. There was a big church meeting coming up in ten days, and I had to be there. I was the priest.
Most clergy wish we didn’t have so many meetings to attend. But we usually manage to show up for the ones we are supposed to lead. At this point I was still one of those clergy.
I recited my tale of woe to the doctor. After two months’ worth of Prozac to treat a long-term major depression, yes, I was less sad. But now I wasn’t sleeping, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t work, felt agitated and irritated. I didn’t used to feel irritated. I didn’t mention the nail file. I wanted those doors to open again and let me out. She figured, and I figured, we needed to increase the dose. Which we did.
A week later I was driving to my congregation, eighty miles south from Iowa City to Fort Madison, through farm fields covered in snow, a rare winter blue sky that day. Again I wondered, could my nail file do any damage? I pressed it into my own throat to find out.
I searched for my jugular with my right hand while sticking the point with my left. I steered with my knees.
Wait a minute. This isn’t safe driving. If I puncture my throat, I’ll end up in the ditch. I need to try this at home.
I wasn’t laughing yet. But I would.
https://shewritespress.com/product/prozac-monologues/
Can you describe the step-by-step process of writing about this ONE MEMORY? The experience described here scared and confused me. I didn’t know what was happening to my brain. I looked up side effects of Prozac and discovered that one of them is bizarre thoughts. That gave me a frame on which to hang this memory, a thought, what I call the nailfile in the neck thing. It also made it possible to repress all of the disturbing emotions of the experience.
I began to entertain myself by riffing on bizarre thoughts. In the bizarre world of American consumer culture, what exactly is bizarre? That became the basis for the first comedic monologue.
I was still self-conscious about the thought itself and buried it at the end of that monologue. My writer’s group encouraged me to move the event to the start of the book. In that position, it inspired the opening chapter, “The Point.” I began to add detail, only—still not enough.
My developmental editor Brooke Warner suggested an addition to the description of the nailfile in the neck thing. She wanted me to add Of course I would never do that. Which made me realize—oh my gosh, she thinks I am normal! She thinks this was a normal bizarre thought that might flash through anybody’s head and simply be rejected and forgotten. Her comment made me reexamine the scene, and then to re-remember it, this time with its full range of fear and confusion.
That is when I added the thoughts in italics, what is called thought broadcasting, in which I wondered if people were reading my mind. I realized that, while I had told the edited version of the story to my first and each subsequent therapist, I had only ever described the thought, never the entire experience which I had repressed. No wonder nobody had ever understood its power over me!
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-thought-broadcasting-5101228
My next step was to take these two pages, largely in the shape they now exist, to my current therapist. I said It’s over ten years in the past, it won’t trigger me. Please use your clearest, most clinical language to describe what was happening to me in this scene. I came home from that appointment with new vocabulary words to look up: depersonalization, derealization, difficulty with reality testing, rehearsal (for suicidal behavior). Paranoia was a word I already knew. It is a feature of my version of bipolar disorder. I also came home with a fuller appreciation of the strange places to which the brain can go and from which it can return.
My final step, in the last stages of preparing the manuscript for publication was to pull out Toni Morrison’s introduction to her Song of Solomon where she describes in exquisite detail the multiple layers of the first sentence of that book. I laid that description before me as I honed the multiple layers of my own first two sentences, including my unmindfulness of my circumstances, my condition, my location in time and space, my suicidal rehearsal, the ice under my feet, and the precarious state of my mind which was about to slip. By the time of this rewriting, I was mindful of everything, the slipperiness of ice, the repeated consonant m, commas, the accents on words, parallelisms, and finally, my own control of my craft to turn this horrific experience into a piece of literature. Writing and reliving this one scene again turned out to be a transformative experience for me.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? Ah yes. There was one line that appeared in two different places, both within this excerpt and in the first monologue. I hated to lose it here, but decided it worked better at the end of the chapter Bizarre.
Why didn’t I pull that nail file on my doc? I had to be at that church meeting…
Besides, I think she could take me.
Willa Goodfellow’s early work with troubled teens as an Episcopal priest shaped an edgy perspective and preaching style. A bachelor’s degree from Reed College and a master’s from Yale gave her the intellectual chops to read and comprehend scientific research about mental illness—and her life mileage taught her to recognize and call out the bull.
So she set out to turn her own misbegotten sojourn in the land of antidepressants into a writing career. Her journalism has attracted the attention of leading psychiatrists who worked on the DSM-5. She is certified in Mental Health First Aid, graduated from NAMI’s Peer to Peer, and has presented on mental health recovery at NAMI events and Carver Medical College of Medicine at the University of Iowa.
Recent appearances include Psychology Today, podcasts Beyond Well with Sheila Hamilton and Being UnNormal with Kimberly Berry, and the Healing Trauma Conference, sponsored by Haelan House. She is a blogger for the International Bipolar Foundation, in addition to her own blog, Prozac Monologues: Reflections on the Mind, the Brain, Society, and Mental Illness.
https://www.prozacmonologues.com/
Today she hikes, travels, plans seven-course dinner menus, works on the next writing project, Bar Tales of Costa Rica, and stirs up trouble. She lives with her wife Helen in Central Oregon and still misses her dog Mazie.
https://www.facebook.com/WillaGoodfellowAuthor/
