NATIONAL BESTSELLER. A harrowing but ultimately uplifting memoir about living with borderline personality disorder—the most stigmatized diagnosis in mental health.
“I didn’t know whether to take you to a psychologist or an exorcist.”
This is how Miranda Newman’s mother described the experience of trying to find an explanation for her daughter’s behaviour. It would be years before Miranda was able to find a diagnosis that explained the complicated way she moved through the world. She would have to advocate for herself in the mental health system while dealing with abuse, being unhoused, survival sex, suicide attempts and hospitalizations.
Through it all, Miranda has found strength in her diagnosis. Her recollections are visceral and confessional, but also self-aware, irreverent and funny. She tells readers how she has found strength and joy in what others might see as tragic, while bolstering her personal recollections with deeply researched observations on Canada’s mental healthcare system, and the history of diagnostics and disorder, using research supported by her work at Yale University.
Download and start listening now!
In society’s recent rush to de-stigmatize mental illness, the benefits seem to accrue disproportionately to people with anxiety and depression—what Miranda Newman wryly calls the ‘softer’ diagnoses. When we leave less well understood conditions like borderline personality disorder out of our newfound compassion, we haven’t grown—we’ve just slightly shifted the boundaries between who is crazy and who is sane. Rough Magic is an important work in pushing back against this trend—gently but firmly asking the reader to put themselves in the shoes of people with BPD and come for a walk. Newman is a capable and experienced guide through this terrain, deftly interweaving poetic recountings of a lifetime of her own experiences with a rigorous and detailed analysis of BPD, from its troubled beginning as a form of non-diagnosis to its disappointing present as a highly stigmatized illness doctors are afraid to even diagnose, while making room for a future full of growth and healing at the personal, institutional, and societal levels.
—
Alex Manley, author of The New Masculinity