There were things about growing up in a mostly white community and the strain that put on my parents that affected my brother and me. I remember being called racial slurs by other little kids in elementary school, and being confused and embarrassed by my parents who had different accents. I grew up in a small town that was mostly white and my parents were immigrants dealing with their own stuff, trying to live in this new country. What are your memories of growing up in the midwest? As I was getting diagnosed, I learned more about what was in my bloodline. A lot of that has to do with cultural stuff – this idea of saving face and not wanting to be open about these things that are not considered appropriate to talk about or that might bring shame upon the family. There was all this family secrecy around mental illness.
I didn’t know about my mother’s cousin who had killed himself. I didn’t know about my great-aunt who had died in a mental institution. I didn’t know about my mother’s mental illness. In the beginning, I didn’t know that there was any mental illness in my family tree.
You write: “I’ve inherited a love of writing and a talent for the visual arts from my mother, as well as her long and tapered fingers I’ve also inherited a tendency for madness.” Could you tell me more about that inheritance of mental illness? That snowballed into what is now this book. It became rather popular and I received a lot of emails and kind comments. After that episode was over, I polished the essay and ended up finding a home for it on the Toast website. As a way of coping, I was writing about it, which became the essay Perdition Days. I was waiting around to see if my first novel would ever sell and I was experiencing a severe episode of psychosis. I had never planned to write a nonfiction book – I have an MFA in fiction. Why did you decide to write The Collected Schizophrenias ? Her New York Times-bestselling essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias, which steps both inside and outside of her condition to bring it to light, has just been published. She was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013 and late-stage Lyme disease in 2015. Wang was named a best young American novelist by Granta (2017) and is the recipient of a Whiting award (2018).
Her first novel, The Border of Paradise (2016), explored mental illness, family and migration. Esmé Weijun Wang, 36, was born in Michigan to Taiwanese parents, has an MFA from the University of Michigan and now lives in San Francisco.
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