Having emigrated from Nigeria to America at age four, Ikpi assimilated uneasily but became a spoken word artist with HBO's Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam. Strong on the outside but crumbling on the inside, she was eventually hospitalized and diagnosed with Bipolar II. Now she advocates for mental health awareness in the worldwide black community as founder of the Siwe project and creator of #NoShameDay. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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

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. (Aug.)