Forney was well aware of being sensitive to tone and, as I suggested, not sounding judgmental about someone’s treatment choices: Having recently read a book that was aggressively anti-medicine for mental illness, I was impressed with how Forney manages to offer advice that could be helpful for everyone, no matter their treatment plan. A psych major in college who loves researching, Forney finds that “between Rock Steady and Marbles, it’s kind of the thesis that I never actually did in college.” Yet while Forney’s book is informed by her copious research, it never reads dry or stuffily academic.Īt times, Rock Steady straddles all the different approaches to treating bipolar disorder. With Rock Steady, Forney included several topics, or “a combination of things,” she says, that “I found important in my own stabilizing and staying stable, things that I had feedback that I’ve gotten from readers” as well as questions from Marbles readers. To write Rock Steady, Forney wanted to look beyond her own personal experiences while still using them as a base: “ I think my earliest idea of what this book was going to be was mostly the things that I found helpful, like the things that Ellen Forney found helpful, which would be kind of an extension of what was in Marbles.” In Marbles, Forney includes several examples of techniques that work for her, such as breathing exercises, and creates intricate drawings in the hopes that readers could benefit from them. Maybe I should do a manual, something that was more thorough.” What bipolar patients and their allies lacked was a guide from someone who’s lived with the illness themselves, and Forney could provide that perspective. Forney realized she still had much more to share: “I have way more breathing exercises, for example, that I think are useful, and I don’t get into mindfulness meditation at all and all these other different aspects that I think are really important.” Rock Steady would pick up where Marbles left off with even more helpful advice and fill the gap in the literature. Wouldn’t Marbles be the perfect mic drop on all things bipolar?Įllen told me about the source of inspiration behind creating a manual like Rock Steady actually arose out of readers finding Marbles to be a guide of sorts: “O ne of the pieces of reader feedback that I got a fair bit was people telling me that they used Marbles like a manual, and I felt like, well, maybe we need a manual. I saw myself in Marbles, and people who I know who had experience with mental illness and read the graphic memoir agreed.
So why return to bipolar? Marbles is a comprehensive immersion into the experience of being diagnosed with a major mental illness and overcoming initial challenges to find a place of stability. Forney on the inspiration behind Rock Steady
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