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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
In Wrong Side Out: Madness Misdiagnosed, Benton Savage looks back on the first bipolar episode that overtook his life at twenty-five, when a belief that marriage would cure his unhappiness became fixed on Lane Johnson, a woman he had once dated. After she declined two proposals, his certainty did not fade. It changed shape, drawing friends and ordinary conversations into a private logic that felt completely real from inside it. A broken hand finally brought Benton into psychiatric care, where doctors named the illness he was not yet able to recognize in himself. From there, the memoir follows years in which he keeps trying to build a life while his understanding of his own mind keeps changing. Savage writes from the difficult distance between what he believed then and what he knows now.
Benton Savage’s Wrong Side Out: Madness Misdiagnosed is extraordinary memoir writing, and Savage is excellent at showing how completely bipolar disorder can change what feels true. Lane giving him Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind is especially moving, because her suggestion that he write becomes important to the life the author builds afterward. I also loved the stranger who sees him walking barefoot and gives him his own loafers, then drives away barefoot himself. That simple kindness stayed with me. The hospital scenes are some of the best parts of the book, especially when the author gives his name as Notneb at a Manhattan hospital. Savage treats that moment with complete seriousness, which makes it hit even harder. Well written and completely open, readers drawn to honest mental health memoirs will find this extraordinary.
