A different Cheney than the one we've all come to know and love
Terri Cheney's memoir 'Manic' has special significance in L.A.
February 1, 2008
Manic Hollywood tales are never in short supply: crazy agents
screaming into the phone, out-of-control actors driving drunk,
starlets creating outre public spectacles or insomniac writers, holed
up in hotel rooms for weeks, hammering out the perfect screenplay.
This is not natural behavior, except in L.A., where it is almost
expected.
The city provides the physical and emotional backdrop for a new book
by Terri Cheney, a former entertainment lawyer who exposes the more
clinical side of all that out-of-control energy. "Manic: A Memoir"
chronicles Cheney's decades-long struggle to come to terms with and
manage her bipolar disorder.
The book is not the first to give an autobiographical account of
living bipolar. It joins the ranks of Kay Redfield Jamison's "An
Unquiet Mind," Carrie Fisher's "Postcards From the Edge" and "The Big
Awful" (two novels based on her life) and Andy Behrman's "Electroboy:
A Memoir of Mania," to name a few. But set in a glamorous world
saturated with money and celebrity, the book not only describes
Cheney's individual struggle against this disease -- which afflicts
5.7 million adult Americans of every age, gender and social class --
it also provides an apt metaphor for the bizarre psychological terrain
of Hollywood.
<more>
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-cheney1feb01,0,3777049.story
.
|
