{"id":67425,"date":"2018-01-20T17:00:55","date_gmt":"2018-01-20T22:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=67425"},"modified":"2018-01-21T05:43:08","modified_gmt":"2018-01-21T10:43:08","slug":"larb-multiculturalism-and-mental-illness-an-interview-with-mira-t-lee-eleanor-j-bader-interviews-mira-t-lee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=67425","title":{"rendered":"(LARB) Multiculturalism and Mental Illness: An Interview With Mira T. Lee"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>ELEANOR J. BADER: Lucia, the younger sister in\u00a0<em>Everything Here Is Beautiful<\/em>, suffers from schizoaffective disorder, and the novel tracks her many psychotic breaks with compassion, terrifying realism, and multilayered complexity. Did you know about this disorder from personal experience?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>MIRA T. LEE:<\/strong>\u00a0There is a lot of mental illness in my family, with multiple family members with schizophrenia. I\u2019ve seen breaks from reality, psychotic behavior where people believe the TV is talking to them or that the FBI is bugging their computers. I\u2019ve seen people stop making sense and become unable to string words together to form a sentence.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve dealt with doctors, hospitals, and social workers, and I am very familiar with the frustrations involved in trying to help someone with this kind of illness, so a lot of the emotions I include in the book are emotions I\u2019ve felt. I know what it\u2019s like to walk on eggshells because someone is disoriented and you don\u2019t want to make the situation worse. Manuel, the undocumented Ecuadoran immigrant Lucia lives with after she leaves her first husband, consistently tries to appease Lucia. Through him, I was able to show how scary it is to see the person you love all but disappear.<\/p>\n<p>But I didn\u2019t just rely on my own experiences. I read many memoirs and blogs about mental illness. There are so many! Just Google first-person accounts of schizophrenia and you\u2019ll see tons of stuff written by people who\u2019ve been there. For a while I also researched post-partum psychosis because after Lucia gives birth to daughter Esperanza she is unable to care for either herself or her newborn.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/multiculturalism-and-mental-illness-an-interview-with-mira-t-lee\/#!\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ELEANOR J. BADER: Lucia, the younger sister in\u00a0Everything Here Is Beautiful, suffers from schizoaffective disorder, and the novel tracks her many psychotic breaks with compassion, terrifying realism, and multilayered complexity. Did you know about this disorder from personal experience? MIRA<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=67425\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,101,104,98,602,129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-children","category-health-medicine","category-marriage-family","category-mental-illness","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67425"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67462,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67425\/revisions\/67462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}