The loopiest of her manic episodes make you smile even as you fear for her sanity her low periods, meanwhile, she treats succinctly, knowing that depression is wearying for the reader (one page contains six frames, each filled with the same image of Ellen covered by a blanket on a sofa). It's a difficult trick: to be both grave and funny at the same time, but somehow she has done it. Forney's account of her diagnosis and her subsequent decade-long struggle to stabilise her condition is an unexpectedly brilliant read. When Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me came out in the US last year, it was to a rapturous reception – and no wonder. Ellen, it seemed, was bipolar – or as she puts it in her new graphic memoir of this time: "I was officially a crazy artist." Excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences? Double check. Inflated self-esteem and grandiosity during these moods? Check. Persistently and abnormally elevated mood? Check. Together, they went through Ellen's symptoms. Her psychiatrist, however, wasn't convinced, and during what was only Ellen's second appointment reached for the ominous blue telephone directory that is known as the DSM ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
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