Book review: Paradoxical Undressing

CONNECTIONS between creativity and madness have long perplexed neurologists and psychiatrists, never mind the artists themselves. In this memoir, Kristin Hersh doesn't explore those connections or attempt to explain them so much as simply demonstrate them.

Hersh, lead singer with the band Throwing Muses, was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 17.

A musician whose lyrics read like poems, she is the archetypal artist driven mad by - what? Her own creative genius? Or something else?

Hersh's memoir of those teenage years, when the band was being formed, through to her diagnosis and accidental pregnancy at the age of 19, is a curious mix of tunnel vision, political awareness, humour and melancholy.

If she were to describe a flower, she would begin by zooming in on the tiniest veins in the smallest petals. Most artists would then pull back, describe the rest of the flower, allow for a greater vision. Hersh, as a result of her illness, or simply because that's the kind of artist she is, cannot do that.

This makes for an unusual perspective, but also a very intense and increasingly claustrophobic one. Hersh wants to pull us in with her and hold us there - some will go willingly and some, I suspect, will resist with everything they've got. Zooming in on the details of life can be a paralysing activity.

We begin her memoir, appropriately enough, with a close-up of an object: "The handmade Jesus on Napoleon's living room wall has no face, just a gasping, caved-in head with blood dripping down its chest."

Hersh pulls away slightly to reveal some Christmas lights in this living room, and the identity of Napoleon, an old man who let folk stay when they needed to.

She scans the panelling of the walls, and the view out of the window, then we meet Jeff, Manny, some of the other inhabitants of the house, described as barely as possible (Jeff "looks just like Jimmy Stewart"; Manny is "a drummer").

Hersh isn't interested in other people - she records her conversations with them, but she has no idea about their dreams or characteristics because she's not interested in them.

Even her friend, Betty Hutton, can't arouse her curiosity - and she is the Betty Hutton, a former Hollywood star who beat Judy Garland to the lead role in The Greatest Show On Earth, a Cecil B DeMille production. Betty talks about Hollywood all the time but Kristin doesn't take her seriously and doesn't really listen.

This kind of focus means that we get almost an unblemished account of what it might be like to have bipolar disorder - without any commentary on it or explanations of it.

The nearest Hersh gets to an explanation is to give a short account of the hit-and-run driver who knocked her down, and to note that the music she hears in her head all the time began after that date.

The driver herself - well, Hersh's impression is "that she was born in that Chevy seconds before she hit me. Then, her work done here, she just pulled over and expired."

We see that people exist to have meaning in Hersh's world, and that's all. That might be a harsh judgment, but Hersh isn't concerned, I suspect, with what other people think.

She's a horribly shy performer on stage, whom Hutton is always encouraging to make more contact with her audience. But Hersh can't do that.

This is an intensely poetic, self-absorbed account of a condition that Hersh somehow has survived - it doesn't permit anything not directly relevant to her (we don't even know who fathers her baby, or when this happens exactly), and that includes her family.

Creativity may be a kind of madness in itself, but it doesn't follow that madness means creative genius. Hersh is lucky she has the tremendous gift of creativity that she has, however painful it may be for her.

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 23 January, 2011