I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying

June 3, 2019
Fraught memories are interrogated and reconstructed in these essays from Ikpi, a poet, performer, and mental health advocate who here grapples with having “lived with depression my whole life,” as well as her struggles with anxiety and bipolar II. Born in Nigeria, she describes coming to America as a small child—rejoining her parents who’d emigrated earlier—carrying memories of her maternal grandmother and entering a tense household divided between a “father loved his parents” and a “mother did not love hers.” Affecting memories of growing up—watching the unfolding Challenger disaster on TV as an eight-year-old in Stillwater, Okla., taking her first trip back to Nigeria as a 12-year-old—flavor a memoir otherwise focused on a nearly clinical account of mental health struggles. Ikpi describes in painstaking detail episodes such as an attack of anxiety before taking a flight, or depression that results in a week of hospitalization. Along the way, she learns of her grandmother’s dementia and is herself diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome before finding the right doctor and an effective treatment. Ikpi’s account is a gift for fellow sufferers; it may also serve instructively for those who care about them, by candidly conveying how one woman faced and overcame her demons. Agent: Eric Smith, P.S. Literary.

Starred review from June 1, 2019

Nigerian American writer and mental health advocate Ikpi (HBO's Def Poetry Jam, editor, Catapult; founder, the Siwe Project) debuts an essay collection that takes readers on a journey from Nigeria to Stillwater, OK, to Brooklyn; from childhood to adulthood; from the depression and mania of bipolar II disorder and mental breakdown to the beginning of stability. The writings are intimate, intense, and sometimes harrowing and claustrophobic. Ikpi struggles to be "normal" and prove to herself and everyone else she's just fine. But she isn't. The author goes days without eating or sleeping, and when she finally does sleep, she's disappointed to wake up. When at last Ikpi gets help, finding the right medication combination is not easy. She stops taking her meds and ends up in the hospital for a week. The loneliness of knowing something is wrong but not being able to fix it is terrifying, the despair suffocating. Ikpi's writing is poetic. It skips, batters, sinks, soars, and flows according to events and the state of her mental health. VERDICT Visceral and unsettling, these essays will not easily be forgotten. A must-read.--Stefanie Hollmichel, Univ. of St. Thomas Law Lib., Minneapolis

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2019
"Imagine you don't fit anywhere, not even in your own head": A Nigerian immigrant and debut author writes of mental illness and its staggering challenges. Catapult contributing editor Ikpi opens with the suggestion that the fractured memories to follow in her memoir may or may not be true. "The trick to lying," she writes, "is to tell people that you're a bad liar because then they'll believe what you say." What she has to say is sometimes heartbreaking, as she recounts a search for reliable memories when she has so few of them. "I need to prove to you that I didn't enter the world broken," she writes before admitting the paucity of fact in a whirl of impressions and sensations. What she does know is that she doesn't know. Things were kept from her, familial facts were forgotten, genealogies erased, and unpleasant truths swept aside. Little things proved overwhelming: the discovery, for instance, that "the twins from my favorite movie, The Parent Trap, were actually one person." If the distance from Nigeria to Oklahoma was great, the leap to adulthood in New York was greater. Depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety proved to be formidable opponents, isolation a constant even surrounded by millions of people. One of the most affecting parts of the book is a simple diarylike reconstruction of a long day that began and ended with an airplane flight, a day of sleeplessness, hunger, and worry ("this doesn't happen to normal people"). Other strong moments in this relentlessly honest narrative recount failed love ("he was the only one I regret being too broken for"), the shame of not being the immigrant success her parents had hoped for, and the quest for wholeness amid a cornucopia of medications targeting a long list of troubles that she expresses simply: "I don't feel good." Deep truths underlie this fragmented, compelling narrative, which leaves readers wishing only the best for its harrowed author.

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Nothing is off-limits in author/narrator Bassey Ikpi's unflinching look at her life as a poet, performer, woman, mother, and child. Her years as a spoken-word poet and performer are evident in the creation of this smooth listening experience. Ikpi is completely in control of her wide-ranging memoir as it switches between levity and seriousness. Listeners will laugh along when this daughter of Nigerian immigrants recounts aspects of her youth. Later, Ikpi's story and her delivery style take on more serious tones as she describes the stress of a very public breakdown. Listeners will applaud her bravery as the chapters build a series of self-revelatory snippets about the ups and downs of balancing mental illness and creative impulses. M.R. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

July 1, 2019
In 22 essays, American-Nigerian speaker, writer, and mental-health advocate Ikpi tells gripping tales of everything from a childhood fear of leprosy to her experiences with the drug ecstasy ( its very name revealed its power ) to later struggles with insomnia, bipolar disorder, and anxiety. The hitch: she admits to being a liar, so it's impossible to know what's true and what's not. Her biggest fib, she says, is telling people she's OK. She asks herself questions, such as, What's wrong with me? She wants to feel like someone whose brain worked and to be normal. Medications come with side effects and she wants ones that don't make her gain or lose weight, and that don't make her drowsy or nervous. Her tortured thoughts and actions (she straddles a guy she barely knows in a cab) are heartbreaking. Highly anticipated, this collection is raw, courageous, and unsettling. People struggling with mental-health issues will appreciate Ikpi as a talented kindred spirit as she raises such universal questions as: What does it mean to be crazy anyway? Haunting and affirming.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)