esmé weijun wang the collected schizophrenias

In the beginning, I didn’t know that there was any mental illness in my family tree. You write: “I’ve inherited a love of writing and a talent for the visual arts from my mother, as well as her long and tapered fingers I’ve also inherited a tendency for madness.” Could you tell me more about that inheritance of mental illness? That snowballed into what is now this book.

It became rather popular and I received a lot of emails and kind comments. After that episode was over, I polished the essay and ended up finding a home for it on the Toast website. As a way of coping, I was writing about it, which became the essay Perdition Days. I was waiting around to see if my first novel would ever sell and I was experiencing a severe episode of psychosis. I had never planned to write a nonfiction book – I have an MFA in fiction.

Why did you decide to write The Collected Schizophrenias ? Her New York Times-bestselling essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias, which steps both inside and outside of her condition to bring it to light, has just been published. She was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013 and late-stage Lyme disease in 2015. Wang was named a best young American novelist by Granta (2017) and is the recipient of a Whiting award (2018). Her first novel, The Border of Paradise (2016), explored mental illness, family and migration. We've had phenomenal guest lecturers like T Kira Madden, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Leslie Jamison, and our students have gone on to nab book deals and publish in top-tier publications.Esmé Weijun Wang, 36, was born in Michigan to Taiwanese parents, has an MFA from the University of Michigan and now lives in San Francisco. I’m also the founder of The Unexpected Shape™ Writing Academy, which is a full-service online writing school for people with limitations who want to write memoir and/or personal nonfiction.

Finally, my short story, “What Terrible Thing It Was,” was featured in the Best American Short Stories 2018 anthology. I write essays that have been published in the Believer, Catapult, Hazlitt, and Salon. In 2018 I received the prestigious Whiting Award for Nonfiction. My debut novel, The Border of Paradise, has received accolades and kind words from places such as LitHub, NPR Books, and the Chicago Review of Books I was selected by Granta for their once-a-decade Best of Young American Novelists list of 21 authors under 40.

My essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias, was a New York Times bestseller its publication is the result of having won the 2016 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize.

Esmé weijun wang the collected schizophrenias