"Manic: A Memoir" offers a flawed Hollywood version of manic depression

"Manic: A Memoir" by Terri Cheney

Morrow, 256 pp., $24.95

Taboos and misunderstandings about mental illness are so widespread that almost any attempt to shed light is worthwhile. First-person accounts can be particularly effective, such as "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness" by "Sophie's Choice" author William Styron, who admits how nearly impossible it is to describe depression to anyone who has not felt it, but who takes up the challenge. Kay Redfield Jamison is a psychiatrist who bravely chronicles her manic depression in "An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness."

Now comes the Hollywood version, "Manic: A Memoir," by former Los Angeles entertainment lawyer Terri Cheney. Vacillating between seductions and suicide attempts, Cheney's account of manic depression lacks reflection and seriousness to the point that it is almost a beach read. What saves it is the author's earnestness.

The book's opener is a suicide attempt by Cheney that is thwarted when she flirts with a locksmith who violently rapes her, then rescues her from a drug overdose. Like much of "Manic," the episode is lurid and hard to believe. To some extent, that is probably the point: Manic depression can turn life into a circus.

Unfortunately, the rubbernecking moments almost never end. Cheney describes her experiences and feelings in detail, but she takes little time to reflect on her illness before embarking on her next escapade or suicide attempt — frantically trying to seduce the man in the mansion next door, almost drowning herself in the Pacific Ocean, flying kites in a thunderstorm on the California coast.

Like a stereotypical Hollywood memoirist, Cheney flashes her credentials — she represented Michael Jackson — and makes gratuitous references to wealth and privilege. "Ever since I was given a 1965 Corvette for my sixteenth birthday, I've been a sucker for sports cars, and this one was a full-throttle work of art," she writes of her college boyfriend's Lamborghini.

Even Cheney's stay in a hospital psychiatric unit turns into fodder for stories instead of a chance at introspection.

She doesn't make many calls from the hospital, deciding "to wait until I was back home and could turn it all into a story. There was certainly no lack of material." Cheney then shares the material, including the guy with the Messiah complex and the paranoid schizophrenic man who holds a plastic fork to her neck. That incident goes unreported to authorities, like the rape at the beginning of the book.

"Manic" is exhausting to read, as it must have been to live. By the time Cheney fully recognizes and accepts her illness, we are as relieved as she, which might be what she intends. For a short while, the reader suffers with her.

Unfortunately, the reader does not gain a deep or enlightened understanding of manic depression, and one wonders whether Cheney has. She quits her high-powered legal career and decides to write a memoir.

"Telling my story is what's kept me alive, even when death was at its most seductive," Cheney writes in a foreword. "[T]he disease thrives on shame, and shame thrives on silence, and I've been silent long enough."

Maybe simply breaking that silence is enough for one book.

Melissa Allison is a Seattle Times business reporter.