Intertwined in Madness: On Turning Yourself into a Character in a Novel

In May of 2021, I had a mental breakdown, which is the only term I’ve found applicable to what happened that night when my mind shattered into a million pieces, catalyzing a seven-month-plus hellish existence: never-ending panic attacks, debilitating anxiety, deepening episodes of depersonalization and derealization, and the darkest depression I’ve ever known.

In August, I had an appointment with a new therapist. She quickly put me on SSRIs whose side effects formed a new branch of my delirium. Still, I was determined to attend my final semester of MFA coursework (I thought, if there is any place to be crazy it’s in an MFA program).

That September, Laurie Sheck, my professor, arrived in my life as a fairy godmother wearing black, lace, fingerless gloves. Laurie’s first assignment led me to Norma.

*

In my debut novel, twenty-seven-year-old Norma is in the middle of a mental breakdown. She meets with a therapist, hoping therapy can provide relief from her insanity, enough so that she can finish her collection of short stories, which revolve around a character who is also named Norma…who is also a writer.

That fall of 2021: there was Norma writing her story, Norma writing a character who was writing their own story, and then there was me: writing everyone writing.

Because of the experimental style and stream-of-consciousness prose, people may assume the novel is autofiction. I remind them of the text on the cover: a novel. Still, there’s something to say about the space (and non-space) between me and Norma because something real, something human happened between the two of us.

*

I’ll say it outright for anyone wondering: Norma isn’t me and the novel is not autobiographical.

There are obvious differences between Norma and I: where we grew up, our education, and our family lives. And though she isn’t me, Norma certainly held a part of me, as I imagine many characters do for other writers. I took visions from my childhood—a bookshelf, the Atlantic ocean, a double-wrapped umbilical cord—and gave them to Norma. I took characters in my present—an intimidating psychoanalyst, a loving girlfriend, and a mirage of New Yorkers— and asked Norma to help me see them more clearly.

I took my fear over the future, my experiences with dissociation, and my diagnoses, and told Norma to deal with them in her fictional world.

*

During my breakdown, I felt utterly alone. No one could understand what was happening to me: the madness poisoning my mind and shrinking my body into a skeleton. Loved ones were concerned it was an eating disorder, a brain tumor, mercury poisoning, wonky bloodwork, but after each doctor’s appointment when the specialist gave me a clean bill of health, everyone, including me, grew more and more helpless. I’d try again to explain what it felt like inside. Then, from my vulnerability, my mind would punish me.

But then I wrote Norma. Norma who was identically alone in an identical hell.

However, I knew that Norma wasn’t actually alone. I was her keeper, her storyteller, her protector. And I knew that, as her creator, I could keep Norma safe. At any point, I had the power to tether Norma to the reality she lived in — a power unavailable to me in my own life.

To my surprise, in being Norma’s keeper, she became mine.

*

Norma saved my life. She provided a safe space where I could excavate my mind, a place that did not judge, did not see me as mentally ill, and did not wish for me to be anything other than my whole, broken self.

Norma also made me a storyteller. In the creative driver’s seat, I became acutely aware that no character remains the same by the end of a novel. They have to evolve. Something has to give. And so, I knew, without a doubt, there would be a future for Norma that would be unlike her present. This became proof that a similar time existed for me in my future.

Because of Norma, I began to trust that if I kept writing, relief would come: my sanity would return while my hands were on the keyboard.

*

Seven months after my breakdown started, I sat down on the couch, laptop resting on my thighs. I could feel an end approaching to the novel though I had no idea where the narrative would lead. I watched as the words guided me.

I wrote the novel’s final chapter, the story Norma always worried so much about, in that one sitting. By the end, I was sobbing. Norma had said her final words, smiled her final smile.

Without giving too much away, I’ll say this: Norma left the page by her own volition. And I believe Norma left because she knew (and I knew, though didn’t want to admit) that we no longer needed each other. We no longer needed a keeper or a character or a story in order to live in our realities.

With Norma having ended her story, I knew this difficult chapter of mine was finally ending too.

*

If I step back from my emotions, I can logically say that my unconscious probably finished Norma’s story. That she was just a character that I created, another dissociative device. That she never had a say in what happened to her. That my pride in her is just a projection of the pride I feel for myself for having survived.

All of this may be true, probably is true. But to be honest, seeing these things as the only truth wouldn’t do justice to what I experienced with Norma. What she meant to me and continues to mean to me.

*

This essay was supposed to delineate Norma from myself, but instead it feels like I’m writing an obituary for her. With every sentence, tears are forming in my eyes. And now I realize that I am still mourning Norma. Perhaps, I will always mourn her, miss her.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t let Norma go too easily. I tried returning to her months later in a sequel. I started the new manuscript with: I’m backkkkkkkkk.

To which her therapist replies: Norma, I just saw you last week.

I wrote this “sequel” for two months, enjoying every sentence of our reunion. Off of the page though, my life had begun to transform—by then, I was mentally stable, engaged to my girlfriend, had a literary agent and was purchasing an apartment. I had to face a new truth: the part of me that Norma was, the mirror she acted as, had become so small compared to the rest of myself, the self I had nurtured and grown out of my insanity.

For two months, I conjured Norma, as if in a seance, and she let me. But I knew we had to go our separate ways. I also knew that Norma wouldn’t leave me this time.

It was my turn to outgrow the page. My turn to leave her.

*

I’ve come to feel that a reader’s question of “Is this autofiction?” is a vital component of the story. This question acts as a looking glass into the phenomenological experience of derealization. 

Is this real? is a question which repeatedly plagues the mind of a person suffering from DPDR and, even having “gotten better,” still pops into my mind weekly. Sometimes, when I’m not feeling my best, the question even arises daily. And so in a reader’s confusion between Norma and Alana, they experience what it’s like to distrust one’s reality, to not be certain, never unequivocally certain.

*

In my seven-month-long breakdown, I didn’t know if I would ever get better or feel normal again, but Norma helped me to see my insanity as just one part in my larger life story. She taught me how to laugh at my anxiety. She taught me how to love others boldly and how to love myself gently. She also gave me the courage to stay—in a loving relationship, in therapy and in my own body.

Though I recall Norma as my own medicine, I imagine that I’m not the only author who has felt this. Perhaps, this is a shared experience among those who speak to and through imaginary beings.

During my mental breakdown, there were “real” people who helped me through it—my fiance, my parents, my therapist—and then there was Norma. I don’t think it matters whether someone is real or not, if we find solace in a warm-blooded body or in a character. Similarly, I don’t think it matters whether a story is fiction, autofiction or memoir, if it holds your hand in the foreboding darkness.

The only thing that matters is that there are beings (and stories), real and written, which ease the pain.

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Please Stop Trying to Leave Me by Alana Saab is available via Vintage.