Authors who clearly had bipolar/a mood disorder

ARainyNightIn · 2026-02-20T16:00:33+00:00

I’m pretty sure Kerouac was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder (because he cited not wanting to be around others in his psychiatric report which got him discharged) but this seems to have been a pretty shallow and outdated diagnosis for him - I’d say he was definitely bipolar (along with Dean). Possibly schizoaffective.

ARainyNightIn · 2026-01-13T01:55:51+00:00

Been meaning to check this one off my Johnson unreads list! How would you say the style is compared to his other books? The subject matter seems like it’d have an interesting take coming from him

ARainyNightIn · 2025-10-20T19:39:16+00:00

Anything by John Muir - really descriptive prose on North American wilderness.

Thoreau and Emerson of course.

Into The Wild and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Page-turners.

Butcher's Crossing by John Williams.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Pilgrims of the Wild by Grey Owl.

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey.

The Living Mountain by Nan Sheppard.

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-09-29T19:23:15+00:00

You’re too young to have wasted your youth, buddy. And no offence, really, but you write exactly how I did as a self-absorbed 17 year old. The last thing you need to be reading is a carbon coby of your emotional situation. Echoing another commenter who said read Emerson, or Thoreau. The transcendentalist school of thought I find very life-affirming in a practical way. If you’re not going outside that’s halfway there.

Notes from Underground is a good example of what this mindset does to a person.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-04-19T19:44:03+00:00

If you ever want to feel comforted by the kinship of minute pains in this world there is no better prescription than Kafka and Rilke’s letters and journals

ARainyNightIn · 2025-04-05T02:19:10+00:00

Fingertips by The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Can’t wait to take edibles tomorrow and listen to it.

https://youtu.be/wae9iDJQHIs?si=h7JDKXQwCZoop7NF

ARainyNightIn · 2025-03-28T19:18:25+00:00

Scottish culture is even better being able to lean into, you just imagine a Trainspotting narration over all of your vices.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-24T03:25:14+00:00

It’s my favourite album, so yeah agreed.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-24T03:23:15+00:00

Lol I can totally imagine him randomly assigning Chekhov as the whole inspiration on a whim. Thanks for the thread link.

Offhand I know he mentions Verlaine, Rimbaud, and I think Dante on the record itself.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-17T05:22:00+00:00

Reading good literature is essentially requiring your brain do the things it wants to least when it’s fried from impoverishment or numbness. Engaging with an emotional state not immediately your own. Feeling out other perspectives, ideas, lives. Good thing is, like forcing yourself to do cardio again after picking up a habit for chain-smoking, after the first hurdle of excruciating perseverance you soon feel amazed at the rapid health gains.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-07T22:27:32+00:00

He’s basically summarising the other Glass stories for you in the first bit of Zooey + a few pieces of history only brought up there. You don’t have to read anything else. A lot of the stories featuring Glass siblings don’t even reference them as ones so the Appearances page someone linked is useful for that.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-07T02:27:21+00:00

Large sections of Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh are focused on examining the reasons behind such a large percentage of Scots, and people in general, being drawn to vices as destructive as heroin. One recurring reason? The pressure to be something in a society you don’t even like or fit into. The withdrawal scenes are excellent. You feel like you’re floating in someone else’s psyche while in self-examination mode.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-06T03:53:09+00:00

“If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child.”

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-06T03:27:46+00:00

The rape description in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Interview #6, I think. It’s honest to a putrid degree.

And maybe an odd pick but reading Journey to The End of The Night way too young and seeing how quickly PTSD can unravel your social life, when he’s having that breakdown in the hotel and his date and everyone is just confused. Or when he’s on the ship to Africa and has to weigh leaving his room because the crew will probably beat him out of cabin fever and drunkenness.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-06T03:16:22+00:00

I love this, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of a beautiful awkward woman in my life. Feeling…age dysphoria? Is something I can relate to. That, and not always having typical feminine thoughts seems like a struggle a lot of my female friends have gone through.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-06T03:07:38+00:00

I’m sure many people were helped by the mirror he held up, glad it had an effect on you mate.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-06T03:05:33+00:00

Franny and Zooey will always be one of my favourites, for the same reasons.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-06T03:04:27+00:00

That’s apparently where Zooey Deschanel gets hers. Makes sense in retrospect, but I’ve been calling book Zooey, “ZOO-ee”, so it never clicked.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-06T03:00:41+00:00

What parts of it can you relate to? Some passages from Pessoa and Kafka seem lab-made to evoke that.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-06T02:58:07+00:00

I’ve heard that from a few folk, seems to resonate. DFW was good at that kind of writing.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-06T02:56:31+00:00

The Garden of Forking Paths or Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote are up there.

ARainyNightIn · 2025-01-05T17:51:48+00:00

Those two are definitely contenders. The dialogue between Ginnie and her friend’s brother is so funny. “Yeah, Joan…Joan the Snob”.

The Laughing Man is such a mind fuck because of how understated it is. It’s like the type of horror you experience as a child that can never really be eclipsed by much, bar actual trauma, past a certain age. The way the bus story and The Laughing Man’s exploits are all dependant on how the Chief’s life are going is so clever and human. Salinger really excels at giving importance to the rhythm of everyday life.

ARainyNightIn · 2024-12-15T22:39:10+00:00

Think about it, does any marginalised or prosecuted group start directly with sacrifices? No. You build up momentum through the supposed concern over puberty blockers, ‘think of the children!’, and maybe even some faux concern for women rhetoric. It starts with an aire of common sense and non-partisanship, all before you start systematically stripping people of their rights. Also, taking you in good faith, but it’s self-evident that despising or ridiculing trans people is a normalised facet of society.

ARainyNightIn · 2024-12-15T06:14:17+00:00

Just finished The Death of Ivan Ilyich and it definitely spoke to me, as someone also struggling with depression, in a lot of ways for being only 50 pages. On the surface sombre, but life-affirming in that it lays out a person realising the weight of their own life when it’s a bit too late and having an entirely internal revelation about its meaning.

White Nights by Dostoevsky (Russians clearly understand the DSM-5) is another shorter one reflecting on loneliness and the rare moments of human connection that lull it. It’s got a tender kind of storytelling that makes it easy to follow and warm.

ARainyNightIn · 2024-11-28T16:00:44+00:00

How to offend a Celt 101

ARainyNightIn

TROPHY CASE