Akiva Reads

by Esmé Weijun Wang

I've been looking for a few years for first-person accounts of psychosis; there really aren't many. (#mentalhealthawareness indeed.) I thought this was very good---very well written, very thoughtful, very honest, very affecting---though of course I'm saying that from the outside.

The smattering of reviews that don't like this book because Wang is "too put together" and "too privileged" are bugging me. (Maybe I don't read enough cis white woman anxiety-and-depression memoirs to see if people are making the same "insufficiently radical!" claims in the reviews, though.) I didn't get the impression Wang was trying to speak for anyone but herself when she was talking about her experiences of masking. She's showing some of her uglier moments instead of uttering radical platitudes, and I appreciate it.