My friend Gerry just put me on to a new author: Abigail Padgett. She's a mystery writer, but her distinction is that her main character, Bo Bradley, is manic-depressive and is constantly struggling with medication, self-doubt, and reality-checks through the course of her adventures as an unorthodox Child Protection Service social worker.The stories are salted with passionate and well-articulated advocacy for the rights and care of the mentally ill. She's got four books out: Child of Silence, Straw Girl, Turble Baby, and Moonbird Boy. The books unfortunately have a fairly conspicuous formula (although it's possible that's imposed by the publisher), and Padgett obviously spends way too much time reading fashion magazines, which is tiresome after the second book. But she spins vibrant, passionate characters, and works from a delightfully kaledescopic social palette. Her writing style runs to hyperbolic metaphor, which I find delightful, and reminds me of Lois McMaster Bujold with the amplitude turned up.
I resonate strongly with Bo's struggles to balance the tendancy, in her manic phases, to see signs and portents and hidden dimensions in everything, with a "rational, sensible" view of the world. Bo's battles with depression sounds, er, depressingly familiar. "Hm. 'Worthless, pointless, hopeless.' Yup, yup, yup." (I just recently identified my own depression in the process of finally getting a handle on the physiology.)
She brings ethnic perspectives to bear on the question, on the one hand in the form of Irish folklore handed down from Bo's grandmother, and on the other through the story-telling traditions of several Native American peoples. She draws fascinating contrasts between the Western European "rational" ways of thinking, and the more allegorical forms in the ethnic worldviews she invokes. This is the most clearly I've seen these contrasts articulated, and specifically, this is the best description I've seen of how my "magical" way of looking at the world feels. (I've tentatively concluded that I'm probably low-grade manic-depressive. But then, I seem to be low-grade just about everything I read about, so I'm disinclined to worry about it.)
Quite a rip. Strong recommend.
--20 January 1997