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Establishing himself among literary greats with his memoir The World at My Back, Germany’s Thomas Melle details the hostile reality of bipolar disorder.
Melle’s emotionally packed prose, brimming with juxtapositions and metaphors, presents a thrilling fifteen-year exhibition of his experiences with mania and depression.
The World at My Back, a bestseller, was initially published in 2016 and has since been theatrically adapted and translated into 18 languages.
In her 2023 English translation, Luise Von Flotow preserves Melle’s dark humour and melancholic essence during his three tragic episodes.
In The World at My Back, as Melle flies higher during his manic phases, his thoughts become faster and more obscure. His deep-rooted narcissism convinces Melle he is the next Messiah and is responsible for worldly creation and destruction.
In the paralyzing depression that ensues, Melle confronts delusions he believed to be reality. The fallout results in several hospitalizations and suicide attempts.
Over time, Melle realizes he is befallen by an inescapable condition. Between 1999 and 2010, six years of his life succumb to being stuck in a manic-depressive state.
Melle’s poetic prowess transports the reader inside his thought processes. His writing is theatrically sarcastic during his mania, tremendously sorrowful through his depression and rapt with fear of relapse during his remissions.
Watching a studious writer slowly lose his literary identity is unnerving. It begs the question of who he would be without it.
“These collections were part of my personality. It’s strange how you can project yourself into the things around you. It’s stranger still to toss them out without really wanting to,” he writes in the memoir.
Transporting the reader to the fire ablaze in his mind evokes frustration and sadness. His overall lack of professional support amplifies these frustrations.
Melle offers insightful commentary about the collective failures of emergency and psychiatric services toward those experiencing mental illness. Through research and his own experiences, Melle portrays their similarities to those of the criminal justice system.
Melle seldom speaks to his experiences with licensed professionals in the hospital, offering detailed accounts of abuse from police and paramedics.
After numerous hospitalizations, the only advice he documented was to remain an inpatient. Inserting some of his interactions with doctors would have enriched his accounts of his notorious “hospital-career.”
Melle distinguishes himself as an influential writer through his ability to vocalize mania-induced crudeness and innate vulnerability. These disheveling extremes ultimately produce a deeply empathetic artist.
“The illness has taken me places that were terrifying and revelatory at once, and I now know the entire spectrum of the society in which I live; I may also be more sensitive to the repressions this society enacts because I have suffered them,” he writes in The World at My Back.
The journal-style chapters carefully capture these sentiments.
Melle frequently prefaces illness-related narrations with subtle content warnings to remain sensitive to his audience. Through these entries, he reconciles with the enormous damage he caused.
To me, the ‘world at my back’ is a clever metaphor for feeling the world’s weight intensely. Twinkling embers of hope catch ablaze as Melle meditates on his third remission, coming to peace with his lingering illness.
This is a thrilling read for anyone who appreciates dark academia, the realities of mental illness, and a literary genius’s thought process.
The writer received a press copy of the book to review.
Featured image by Hannah Wanamaker/The Charlatan.
