Divine Madness

Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle by Jeffrey A. Kottler
Some might say I've been reading too many stories about mental illness, but I find it fascinating. Kottler's collection includes 10 stories about incredibly fascinating people who suffer(ed) from severe mental illness, but also managed to create many kinds of phenomenal art: Sylvia Plath, Judy Garland, Mark Rothko, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Charles Mingus, Vaslav Nijinsky, Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce, and Brian Wilson (the lone living example of madness and creativity seemingly intertwined). Kottler's writing is so engaging that the stories read like perfectly crafted fiction, but it's all real--told here through research that includes studying the subject's own journals and several biographies. I originally thought I'd just read those that interested me most (Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway). Instead, I found myself completely taken into the creative and yet sometimes mad worlds of the other artists.