My Body Is a Book of Rules

by Elissa Washuta

Overview

As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren’t threatening her life, they’re shoving her from depression to mania and back in the space of an hour. Her crisis of American Indian identity bleeds into other areas of self-doubt; mental illness, sexual trauma, ethnic identity, and independence become intertwined. Sifting through the scraps of her past in seventeen formally inventive chapters, Washuta aligns the strictures of her Catholic school education with Cosmopolitan’s mandates for womanhood, views memories through the distorting lens of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and contrasts her bipolar highs and lows with those of Britney Spears and Kurt Cobain. Built on the bones of fundamental identity questions as contorted by a distressed brain, My Body Is a Book of Rules pulls no punches in its self-deprecating and ferocious look at human fallibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597099691
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	08/12/2014
Edition description:	1
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	187,219
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Elissa Washuta, a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, was born in New Jersey and now lives in Seattle. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington in 2009 and has been the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Award, a Potlatch Fund Native Arts Grant, a 4Culture Grant, and a Made at Hugo House Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Third Coast. She is an adviser and lecturer in American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. My Body Is a Book of Rules is her first book.

Table of Contents

The Dread 2

Note 9

Please Him 16

Faster Than Your Heart Can Beat 28

Preliminary Bibliography 40

The Kindling Model in Bipolar Disorder 50

Prescribing Information 53

Dear Diary 60

Fucker and Fucked 73

Dear Diary, Part 2 89

Sexually Based Offenses 95

Actually 118

Many Famous People Suffer from Bipolar Disorder 130

I Will Perfect Every Line Until My Profile Is Flawless 159

Please Him, Part 2 171

The Global Positioning Effect 181

Editorial Reviews

06/30/2014
Washuta, a Seattle writer and member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, is a survivor and cautionary tale. In her harrowing chronicle of bipolar disorder, sexual violence, and struggles with Native identity, she provides a window into this country’s failures when it comes to responding to mental illness, rape and the negative messages women receive about their sexual agency. A friendless student obsessed with holding onto her scholarship at the University of Maryland, Washuta was a virgin when she was raped by an acquaintance. In denial over what happened and without faith in the justice system, she didn’t take legal action. When she finally sought help more than a year later, a woefully inadequate clinic staff misdiagnosed her and prescribed the wrong medications. The literal highs and lows the search for a manageable chemical cocktail are such that she adores a pill that causes massive weight loss even though it makes her feel “at risk for ripping own heart out.” Although Washuta’s story is not an easy read, the fact that Washuta has been able to build a life for herself is a credit to her fierce strength. It’s one that parents, educators, mental health providers, and young women will find immensely valuable. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

You should have [My Body Is a Book of Rules] on your radar now. . . . Washuta’s story is . . . an ultra-modern take on contemporary femininity, mental illness, and identity.”
—Cosmopolitan, “12 Memoirs by Women That Will Get You Through Anything”

“In a reliably honest, original and frank fashion, Washuta’s ruminations lift the veil of her chronic (and highly medicated) bouts of mental illness to reveal the confused, frenetic and often traumatic reality of living with overwhelming bouts of depression and mania.”
—Kirkus Review

“Although Washuta’s story is not an easy read, the fact that Washuta has been able to build a life for herself is a credit to her fierce strength. It’s one that parents, educators, mental health providers, and young women will find immensely valuable.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Elissa Washuta is an extraordinarily original and gifted writer, and My Body Is a Book of Rules is an extraordinarily original and often brilliant book. Its formal innovations are in the service of a sustained and powerful investigation of body in relation to mind, and body in relation to culture.”
—David Shields
 
“My Body Is a Book of Rules chronicles the Chutes and Ladders-style descent into the body and ascent out through the head that is our present coming-of-age myth. A sweet soul will spill out; they just do. We’re lucky that every now and then, someone as thoughtful as Elissa Washuta takes the time to record what this feels like.”
—Kristin Hersh of the band Throwing Muses and author of the memoir Rat Girl

“Bodies are us. And not. How do we figure out which is which? Elissa Washuta takes you on a fearless ride of sex, drugs, mood disorders, self-improvement, dieting, internet dating, ethnic identity, and why she isn’t Catholic anymore. My Body Is a Book of Rules is a funny, scary, unpredictable book; it reads like the inside of your own head.”
—Sallie Tisdale
 
 “A genre-bending ode to the bi-polar brain, Washuta’s venomous, lyrical chapters link to form a memoir that’s daring, vulnerable, caustic, and raw. Reading this book, you find yourself in a staring contest with a writer who won’t look away—not from her devastating betrayals of body and brain, nor the chronic search for a chemical cure. She explores the nuances of blood quantum, Cosmo, catechism, psychotherapy, promiscuity, fencing, and Law & Order SVU in a voice that embraces its self-deprecating, self-destructive, humorous, bedazzled contradictions.”
—Nicole Hardy

 

From the Publisher

2014-07-01
A candid, autobiographical scrapbook from a young womannavigating manic depression.In her forthright debut, Washuta intimately chronicles herongoing struggle with the triple threat of a 2005 sexual assault, bipolardisorder, and the powerful antipsychotic medication prescribed to balance hermind and body ("chemical torture is the trade-off"). In each creativelyimagined chapter, the author delivers explicit insight into her life: abibliography of influential books; reflections on her college years at theUniversity of Maryland, where she conducted sexual habit studies and imbibedvodka-laced "liquid dinners"; the conundrum of obtaining a sexual educationwhile in Catholic school; her hilariously footnoted Match.com online datingprofile; and a harrowing medicine-cabinet glossary of her prescription "bipolarbuffet." Washuta then graphically describes her sexual escapades in Seattle,where she was able to "absorb every one-night stand into my body and keep itthere." Other sections find the author personally identifying with TV's Law & Order, Kurt Cobain and BritneySpears. In alternating chapters, she discusses the internal and external impactsof her Indian heritage as a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe ("It took sometime to get the hang of being simultaneously white and Indian") and how beingraped altered her sense of identity and exacerbated her bouts of bipolardisorder ("Before I knew I was bipolar, and could settle into that, I hadthe rape. It was bloody and violent and it was an injustice of the kind myancestors knew"). In a reliably honest, original and frank fashion,Washuta's ruminations lift the veil of her chronic (and highly medicated) boutsof mental illness to reveal the confused, frenetic and often traumatic realityof living with overwhelming bouts of depression and mania.A fever dream of darkly personal memories and musings fromthe shadowy corners of sexual violence and mental illness.

Kirkus Reviews