When Marya Hornbacher published her acclaimed first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet have the piece of shattering knowledge that would finally make sense of the chaos of her life: the underlying reason for her distress. At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with type I rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, the most severe form of the condition there is.

In her wry and utterly self-revealing style, Hornbacher tells her new story in Madness. Through scenes of astonishing visceral and emotional power, she takes us inside her own desperate attempts to counteract violently careening mood swings by self-starvation, substance abuse, numbing sex, and self-mutilation. Her brave and heart-stopping memoir details her fight up from madness and describes what it is like to live in a difficult, sometimes beautiful life and marriage when the bipolar tendency always beckons.

Millions of people in America today are struggling with a variety of disorders that may disguise their bipolar disease. Marya Hornbacher's fiercely self-aware portrait revolutionizes our understanding of this all-too-common, all-too-misunderstood disorder.