Victim of Dreams

Novelist, poet and musician Jeremy Gluck draws on his experiences of growing up in post-War Canada in a breath-takingly beautiful and poignant account of his battle with bipolar disorder (manic depression). He contrasts a depiction of his descent into depression and madness with the narrative innocence of his childhood.

Victim of Dreams can help others to understand what it is like to develop, have and/or survive a severe and enduring mental health condition. More than anything else service users want empathy: Manuals and guides are essential, good medical support crucial, medication crucial of course, but those with serious MH conditions are so plagued by feeling misunderstood and isolated that empathy is the key. Exploring in anecdotal and lay terms the genetic and environmental genesis of the disorder in me, the book is written in a highly professional literary style, including vivid memoir and especially penetrating accounts of depression and manic delusion - drawn largely from journals kept at the time and therefore vivid in their evocation of mania and depression - and is a new kind of survivor book that eschews "misery" for memory and asks, again and again, searching questions about the nature of our lives, minds, memory and capacity to endure what is, after all, a part of ourselves seemingly set to destroy another, more benign part.

The book is in three parts or "lives". The first part is my innocence, when the illness lies dormant but shadowing. In the second part, I wrestle with madness as the illness reveals itself. Coming from a more balanced and objective viewpoint, in the final part I review both having brought myself back. I can now show myself as someone different, neither the innocent nor the madman, and importantly not the person I have been accused of being.

I am 49, an expatriate Canadian with a background in the arts, now working in the voluntary sector in Wales as a mental health information and research worker. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2002. My lifelong experience as a published writer/author has equipped me ideally to write an insightful literary account of my life leveraged to the impact upon it of the illness, my eventual diagnosis and coda heralding my recovery.