ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a close reading of The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth, and Metamorphosis (2008), a life narrative in which American-Canadian author Mike Barnes weaves an account of his lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder that challenges the conventional illness narrative of triumph and the ableist temporal parameters in which it is inscribed. The chapter turns to the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope to analyze how this challenge is inscribed through the temporal articulations that structure the four autobiographical essays that compound the memoir. In a first section, the chapter demonstrates how Barnes destabilizes the linear therapeutic trajectory that mental health strategies usually foster, while a second section examines the configuration of different intimate shared chronotopes that open the relational scheme of the narrative. Eventually, the chapter argues that Barnes’s disruption of linearity and individuality build a life narrative in which the unmanageability and uncertainty of living with chronic psychic distress are embraced and invested with hope.
