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Sophie has always lived her life in the shadow of her mother's bipolar disorder: monitoring medication, making sure the rent is paid, rushing home after school instead of spending time with friends, and keeping secrets from everyone. But when a suicide attempt lands Sophie's mother in the hospital, Sophie no longer has to watch over her. She moves in with her aunt, uncle, and cousin--a family she's been estranged from for the past five years. Rolling her suitcase across town to her family's house is easy. What's harder is figuring out how to rebuild her life. And as her mother's release approaches and the old obligations loom, Sophie finds herself torn between her responsibilities toward her mother and her desire to live her own life, Sophie must decide what to do next.
Amazon.com
In her debut novel, Sara Polsky tells the story of Sophie, a teenage (high school junior) girl living with her mentally ill mother (struggling with a blend of manic depression and bipolar disorder). Over the years, Sophie has become accustomed to being her mother's caretaker, instead of the other way around. She's never had much time for a childhood because it's largely been left up to her to make dinner every night, tend to laundry and other household chores, and to stay on her mom about taking the prescribed medications.
Then one day everything takes a horrible turn. Sophie comes home from school to find her mother on the floor, unresponsive and barely alive after a suicide attempt. Thankfully Sophie's mother is successfully revived at the hospital and prescribed Depakote to help try to balance her mind again. The attending physician suspects that Sophie's mother will require weeks of recovery, maybe even long-term care in a mental health facility, so in the meantime Sophie is sent to live with her aunt, uncle and cousin Leila.
Leila and Sophie were thick as thieves as small children but drifted apart around their 6th grade year....for reasons Sophie doesn't entirely understand. At first, Leila seems a little put out having her cousin around so much again but the constant close proximity to one another forces the girls to hash out their grievances and find common ground once again. There's also James, who used to hang with Leila and Sophie back in the old days but who also seemed to pull away from her over the years. James seems eager to rebuild the frayed friendship and help her through this tough time, but given what she's been put through recently, Sophie is reluctant to put her trust in anyone again.
...There's still that rusty door in my mind, with its heavy padlock and no key. All of the words I'm thinking are hidden behind it.
The time with Leila's family gives Sophie a chance to work out her own thoughts about everything that's gone down in recent years. Not only is she able to slowly repair her bonds with Leila and James, but she's also able to view her mother's mental illness from a new, more empathetic perspective.
Though this story deals with heavy themes such as suicide and depression, I found that it didn't leave me with an oppressive feeling as similar books have in the past. Instead I found this novel to be more quiet and thoughtful. It can be sad and even heartbreaking, in parts, the way it looks at how trauma can influence or change one's way of looking at the world, but there is also an underlying sense of hope to the whole thing. I could relate to Sophie's struggles with that feeling of life getting in the way of life sometimes -- when something stressful or traumatic that you feel requires all your attention is going on, yet you still have to go to school or work and act like everything is a-okay even though there's a damn crisis going on out there people! Sophie's story also illustrates the value of a person being able to fearlessly communicate their wants and needs and how, in times of conflict, it's only natural to get nostalgic for what we perceive as simpler past times (when in reality those rosy-hued days more than likely had their share of conflict then too).
I'm amazed that we can talk about these two things... in the same conversation. That it doesn't have to be one or the other -- happy or sad, my mother or my life. Maybe it can be like the axis on a graph, right in the middle, everything at once.
While I didn't always agree with some of the statements made in this novel -- like Uncle John saying "people wouldn't ask if they didn't really want to know", sorry I call BS, in the real world, people ask stuff merely out of politeness, and then tune out your response, all the time! -- I really enjoy this story for the food for thought it provides the reader on some tough topics that need more open and honest discussion. I found Polsky's novel to be an honest look at depression through the eyes of a teen without it being too heavy-handed, to the point where it might trigger MY depression!
"The Guest House" by Rumi, referenced in This Is How I Find Her
