How Jennifer Niven’s All the Bright Places gets mental illness right.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
My depression is constant but mutable: here a sustained melancholy, there a waking anxiety, now a sharp pang of doubt. In recent years, it has manifested as a recurring suspicion — quiet at first, but eventually needling its way into the forefront of my mind — that the life I'm living is false. It spreads like a tear in the fabric of my reality, offering glimpses of what it insists is the truth beneath it, full of chaos, panic, and utter ineptitude. It's a secret that I'm finally in on, a higher level of understanding; I'm at once doomed and freed; the world is dark but at least my eyes are open in it; I'm just as bad as I feared. Then it passes.
This depression is mine; others' belong to them. Their lows, their coping mechanisms, their definitions of recovery, and their paths to or through it, would be as foreign to mine as any other ailment. And since the most visible stories of depression focus more on redemption — usually in the form of some strong will, a pill, that person who finally gets you — than on the struggle, the surest conviction held by the depressed person is the singularity of her experience of it. All of this to say I did not expect to find my own depression narrated back to me in a YA novel about two high-schoolers in love.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
"Is today a good day to die?" wonders Theodore Finch in the very first line of All the Bright Places, Jennifer Niven's remarkable YA debut. The teenage outcast is standing on the ledge of his school's bell tower, weighing the pros and cons of ending it all. The scene doesn't feel especially dramatic or urgent; if anything, it's alarming in its mundanity. He considers the question evenhandedly until he spots Violet Markey — a popular girl still reeling from the death of her sister — who is apparently wondering the same thing.
The pair make it down together safely, if a little embarrassed, but quickly realize their connection lingers. What follows is a roller coaster ride of a romance, not without its flaws (Finch's behavior borders uncomfortably on stalking at times) but impressively layered, lived-in, and real. Violet is a strong and inspiring protagonist, relocating her passion after family tragedy sapped her dry, but it's Finch who continues to stick with me.
Though she never explicitly names it, Niven's portrayal of manic depression, and teenage depression in particular, is deliberate and unsanitized. Finch's first-person narration (which alternates with Violet's) is an authentic presentation of living in the thick of depression — not fighting it, not recovering from it, just living it — and it's best when it makes the reader uncomfortable. Finch pulls no punches when he jokes with his guidance counselor about who will be the first to know when he goes, and neither does Niven, as she forces us to confront the myriad reasons a human being, not a caricature of one, considers suicide.
We meet Finch on day six of being "awake," a condition that he defines by its opposite — the spells of days or weeks he describes as being "asleep" or "down" — and that he is desperate to maintain. He stockpiles days of clarity as if to fortify his happiness, but the "sleep" rears its head from time to time. Consider his narration on a particularly bad day:
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