Two Novels That Make Mental Illness Legible
<em>Juliet the Maniac </em>and <em>Rabbits for Food </em>use split perspectives and fractured timelines to illustrate how some disorders can threaten a person’s sense of self.
Editor’s Note: If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line.
In the hours before her second suicide attempt, Juliet, the eponymous teenage protagonist of Juliet Escoria’s new novel, starts “doing the thing where I removed myself from myself.” As if floating outside her own body, she sees herself as a too-skinny girl with tangled hair, beset by hallucinatory demons, whose expression is “so flat … that she might as well have been dead.” The vision leads Juliet to conclude, temporarily, that there is no hope for
