Description:
The Rapids is a cultural history of manic depression twinned with a personal narrative told through an innovative approach to writing memoir.
Brief description:
Sam Twyford-Moore is a critic, essayist, and writer based in Australia.
Review Quotes:
' The Rapids takes the reader by the hand and lays out the realities of mania, up close and personal - what it's like to wrestle with and how the brain navigates its swiftly tilting universe.'
'As with all great first-person works on mental health, Twyford-Moore's The Rapids generously weaves his experience of mania through his critical scholarship without purporting to offer any sort of final, clinical clarity. Twyford-Moore's work - at once critical, personal, and historical - thrusts our misconceptions of mania against the rocks, casting both light and shadow: revealing shapes where there was once mystery, and placing mystery back where shapes once stood.'
' The Rapids is a beautiful narration of the beauty and heartache inherent in madness. A humorous and considerate self-reflection on the way our private worlds are inextricably informed and vulnerable to culture, art and music. A personal account and generous contribution to the expanding experiential and scholarly work of Mad studies.'
'An important work, The Rapids is about what it means to write and represent madness across media, such as film and literary critique, and how we come to know ourselves through these media, and how they in turn come to inform our understandings of our own experiences of madness, both in constrictive and constructive ways.'