A new essay collection about the schizophrenias tackles everything from diagnosis to Slender Man
“Schizophrenia terrifies” — these are the first words in the first essay in Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias.
Wang is the author of the novel The Border of Paradise and the recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award. She also has schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, a condition she is used to describing as “the fucked-up offspring of manic depression and schizophrenia.”
“I never intended to be a non-fiction writer and I still primarily consider myself a novelist,” she says. Though primarily called to fiction, Wang wrote The Collected Schizophrenias because schizophrenia and its associated conditions do terrify, and remain so stigmatized, and there is so little writing from people who have the condition. The essays in the…
