When I heard that Marin Sardy was coming out with a memoir, I knew I had to read it. Marin and I were classmates in our writing program, and I remember her writing as sharply insightful, crisp and clean, and above all thoughtful. The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia is about the fractures that schizophrenia has rendered in her family. Her mother and brother are affected, and the disease eventually killed her brother. But this is not only a book about schizophrenia. It’s about the nature of family, the nature of sanity and mental health, what it means to have a body and mind, and what happens when these are broken.

Marin and I were able to chat over email about her book.

As I read your book, I kept putting it down and coming back to it—there is a lot to take in and reflect upon. I really appreciated that: the musings on the body, on the mind, how they break, etc. I think the non-linear format was the perfect choice for these musings. Was it a conscious choice?

First of all, I’m so thrilled that you had that experience with the book. In reply to your question: yes and no. The fragmentation and broad associations that occur throughout the book are in part just a reflection of how my mind works, and what feels exciting for me when I’m getting things onto the page. Linear narrative, I’ve realized, doesn’t express my experience of living very accurately. My own experience was one of fracturing—my family breaking apart, and my own well-being breaking down at various times. I think I gravitated toward the idea of breakage because it intuitively felt like a way to communicate the impact of trauma. Also, I realized early on that this more fractured mode was ideally suited to writing about schizophrenia, because it captures so much of the way psychosis fragments, shifts, and disrupts experience in the minds of those who live with it. And, because my life has been intimately entwined with schizophrenia for 35 years, it has shaped my worldview enormously, which might be part of why writing in fragments and loops and digressions feels most natural to me. Maybe it taught me to see life differently, to be aware of how much order we just impose on things, how much we construct to create an illusion of wholeness in reality—a concreteness that really isn’t true, despite how much it helps us function. But one thing that appealed to me about this structure as a concept, early on, was the way it could act as a bridge between myself and my mom and brother. The structure highlights where my experience and theirs overlap. It is something we have in common.

I had initially, several years ago, tried to write a traditional, linear narrative memoir about my experiences with schizophrenia. For a long time I pressed forward, even though it felt increasingly inadequate in some way. Too coherent. Too clean. Too distant, somehow. Then my brother died, and in the wake of that I had to stop writing for a while—I just couldn’t; the grief was too intense—and when I finally was able to go back to it, I found I no longer had the motivation to work on the original book. It just felt way wrong, way not where I was at, and dead on the page. What felt alive, though, were the essays I had been writing and publishing all along. And they still felt surprising and interesting and revealing to me in ways that the narrative had never been. And that was when I decided to focus on writing more essays and collecting them into a book, which I later tweaked further to make it more memoir-like. Now I think of The Edge of Every Day as “memoirs” or “a memoir in essays,” which is why in the title we went with Sketches of Schizophrenia. “Sketches” seemed like the perfect descriptor.

One term I considered, in fact, was “a fractured memoir.” I felt very strongly that the body of the text needed to carry within it some of the same kinds of marks that had shaped the lives, the minds, the hearts, and the bodies I describe in the text. We have all been broken in different ways by schizophrenia, and I wasn’t going to let the shape of the text obscure the very far-reaching implications of that. I think it’s easy to ignore how much the form of a piece of writing contributes to its meaning (especially in nonfiction, with its greater focus on facts), but to me that felt like an absolutely necessary element for this book, for this topic.

What was the impetus for writing this book?

Um, my whole life? I know that sounds like a joke but I’m not sure it’s possible to parse it further. I am thinking of something by Dostoyevsky that I once read in which he spoke of his time in prison. He described the crush of the stories that kept building inside him, the waiting to get out of prison so he could write them down and release the pressure. Similarly, this book is a compendium of stories that have lived inside me that I’ve felt unable to release in an ordinary way. They’re about schizophrenia and so I was often unable to communicate them because there was no space in the discourse for them. I felt that I had to open a space in the discourse—that my writing would have to do the work of opening that space for itself—and so it became important to say things a certain way. And while I was figuring out how to do that, the stories were in there, pressing up at me until I let them out. I have said before that I write into the gap between what I see and what others tell me is there to be seen. I have to put the things that are invisible to others, the things no one else is talking about, that no one else is recognizing and acknowledging and describing, out into that space. Otherwise life is too isolating, and I don’t do well in isolation.

What have you done to maintain a space for yourself and your work (writing and otherwise) within stepmotherhood?

In some ways, being a stepparent feels ideal for me, because as the third parent, I have had opportunities to back away from the constant daily responsibilities of parenting for periods of intensive writing time. In my situation, with two other engaged parents, I don’t need to be in the trenches on a daily basis as much. In fact, I feel very lucky that my life has worked out this way. I suspect that being a stepparent is a much better fit for me than being either a biological parent or being child-free would be. But of course, maintaining the space to write is still a challenge. One thing I often do is wake up earlier than everyone else in the house and make use of those beautifully still, early-morning hours to get the deep stuff onto the page. Writing when I first wake up has always been the best mode for me because in that not-quite-awake state, things come to the surface unimpeded by the daily concerns that quickly steal your attention, and I can concentrate fully on them before the needs of the day push everything else out. Additionally, I can run off on self-created writing retreats from time to time. Last summer I spent a month in Santa Fe, staying in two different friends’ homes that were empty for a few weeks. It’s great to have the freedom to do that, and those solitary days are so conducive to writing.

Do you have a writing routine?

Sort of! I think I’m a pretty diligent worker, but I can’t really produce good creative work within a tightly controlled schedule. I have general tendencies: Since I love writing in the morning, I try to protect my mornings as much as possible. Also, because my work is so intuitive, I don’t ever just sit in front of an empty page until I can force something out. That effort is, to me, beyond useless. If the words aren’t coming, I wait until they are. I do have plenty of tricks to help them along though—my morning walk is a big one, which I do with my dog every day. When I’m deep in the process of producing pages, I try to stick to a 9-5 kind of schedule (but a flexible version of it) in which I’ll intersperse stints of actual writing with all kinds of meditative tasks around the house that allow my mind to keep working through the problems of the writing in the background—washing dishes, showering, dusting, doing laundry. Sometimes, when the material is really emotionally difficult, I turn to television. When I wrote the Vagabond chapters for this book, for instance, I spent whole afternoons alternating between writing and watching a lot of episodes of SyFy Channel tv shows. I was too emotionally exhausted by the writing to do anything besides sit in a chair, and I needed something engaging enough to free my mind to sort through the material unconsciously, but easy enough that I could essentially do it with zero effort. Bad television turned out to be perfect for that, and I’m enough of a nerd that my favorite kind of bad tv is sci-fi (especially the kind that involves outer space), so that’s what I watched. It’s funny because I never read sci-fi but I love to watch it.

Late in the book, there’s a line about your brother: “He understood that lack of agency unmakes a body.” This is true on so many levels—physical, emotional, psychological—and especially in the current sociopolitical climate, as we talk about women and motherhood and trans rights and so much more. It made me go back to an earlier line in the book where you say, “I suspect that the only real weapon we in my family have ever had against mental illness is how we choose to live.” In other words, agency. It feels like this theme is woven throughout the book. Can you speak to this a little bit?

This is interesting for me to hear because I often don’t notice such connections in my own writing until others point them out. I don’t know exactly why I zeroed in on all these themes—so much of my writing process, the really meaty part, is deeply unconscious. I never know what I want to say until I’m saying it. And if it feels important and potent, if it’s grabbing me, I just trust that. It’s not at all surprising to me when they end up being deeply interconnected, but that’s never what I set out to do.

I can say that our current moment in history definitely contributed to my musings on my own female body, and to questions about to what extent I had control over how it had shaped my life and to what extent I didn’t. (I wrote early drafts of both “The Wildcatter” and “Break My Body” around the time the Bill Cosby thing was blowing up, which of course was just the beginning of a long string of public events that brought my femaleness into sharp relief for me.) And that heightened awareness lent itself to thinking in terms of other kinds of bodies that I’ve been close to that have also been symbolically and philosophically attacked—bodies shaped by schizophrenia.

I suppose in some sense, it all goes back to a sense of the historical silencing that has long surrounded mental illness. I still feel that silence, and the belief that it must be that way, like something heavy in the air. I still feel the threat of erasure. And that threat is very physical, which is part of why it has always bothered me that so much cultural criticism feels utterly disembodied. Also, as my sister pointed out recently, one result of feeling invisible as a child is that it’s hard to ever believe anything you say or do really registers for other people. That your words and actions can actually alter the course of events. So I tend to feel the need to respond with not just words, but also flesh and bone. Something more solid than language. So I guess it’s no surprise that I’m always trying to shove that flesh and bone right into the text.

How do you think the creative community can support women, and mothers and stepmothers especially?

What I would love from the creative community is a greater understanding that being a stepmom is a big deal, a big thing. I am deeply beholden to my stepchildren and deeply invested in their well-being, not just now but for the rest of my life. They are my family, my real family, my whole family. I feel that people simply have no idea how to understand the terms of my life. In a sense, it’s been nice that I was given so much psychic freedom to define the role for myself, and ultimately that’s what I’ve done. But I’d like to see more creative people making art and conversation about it! I suppose that’s on me, too—and I suspect I will write about it someday, but I’m not ready yet.

I remember, when I first got engaged to Will, I went looking for movies that involved a major stepmother figure, to get a sense of what this was going to be all about. All I found, aside from two halfway decent dramas (“Stepmom” and “The Other Woman”), was a slew of horror films. This was how I discovered that the stepmom is a major horror trope. Which seemed oddly fitting, since schizophrenia is already the most hackneyed (and horrifically stigmatizing) horror trope in existence. But seriously, it wasn’t until I went looking for things to watch and read about being a stepmom—for art about it, not just pop-psychology—that I realized how little is out there. Which is bizarre, considering how deeply woven into American life stepfamilies have become. I actually cried when I first heard Alicia Keys’ song “Blended Family.” I was like, “Alicia’s a stepmom, too! She gets it!”

Is your mother aware that you’ve written this book? If so, what has her reaction been?

My mother does know about the book, in a general sense, and has known about it nearly since its inception. She is thankfully very blasé about the idea of being written about in someone else’s book, and additionally she’s a very supportive mother in the sense that she just wants me to do what makes me happy. I wasn’t sure how she would react, though, to the specifics of the book, so I broached the topic little by little over time. Also, her memory has been so deeply compromised by her illness that I can never be sure what she remembers of the conversations we’ve had, which is part of why it made sense to bring it up at intervals. And there is always the uncertainty about how fully she grasps what any of this means—how real she registers it to be. By now she more or less knows the gist of the book, but at some point, she understood that she wasn’t going to like everything I said in the book and she decided she didn’t need to know any more. She wanted to let the matter rest, so I haven’t brought it up lately.

I’ve asked myself if I write about her for the right reasons, and if the book could potentially harm her in any way (aside from hurt feelings, which of course aren’t nothing)—and I feel solid in the answers being “yes” and “no,” respectively. But I know this also touches on much deeper concerns about power and representation, and I’ve just tried to consider those as consciously as I can and to make sure that when I write about schizophrenia, I write about it responsibly, in ways that destigmatize mental illness and push back against negative stereotypes, and that I always show respect, on the page, for her autonomy and agency.

What are you struggling with, as a stepparent and as a writer, right now?

Right now, my stepkids’ mother has been having health problems, so they’ve been needing extra emotional and practical support in dealing with that. I find that emotional energy is the commodity that most quickly runs dry in the effort to balance writing and family. The kind of writing I do really requires everything I have, so I don’t make much progress in my writing when a lot of my emotional energy needs to be applied to actual daily life. I was lucky in the last year of working on this book, because things were mostly really calm and pleasant, not requiring much emotional labor. But never knowing when I might have to set the writing aside for a while—that can be hard.

What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?

For the past few years I have been inspired by many memoirs and memoir-like books that are essayistic or fragmentary in their approach. I loved Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk—the way she folds into her own story of grief and falconry a story of the author T.H. White’s goshawk, so that the two subjects resonate both thematically and emotionally more and more as the book progresses. Those kinds of unexpected pairings, when done well, just feed my soul. Nick Flynn’s fragmentary memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Susanne Antonetta’s essay collection A Mind Apart, and Mira Bartok’s memoir-in-essays The Memory Palace, all come to mind as books that have inspired me and shaped my thinking and writing about mental illness. And at this moment I’m reading Esme Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias. I am always eager to read first-person accounts of schizophrenia and Wang does it so insightfully and engagingly.

What advice would you give to a writer trying to juggle parenthood and writing?

Know what your priorities are and focus on them. In general, it has been to my advantage that I’m not someone who does a lot of spinning of my wheels. (The major exception being when I was grieving the loss of my brother. For about two years I feel like I did hardly anything but spin my wheels. Although in retrospect, I can say I was laying the groundwork for the latter half of my book.) I think this sense of purpose comes from my Dad, who was once an officer in the Army and who has hung on to some of the most useful aspects of the training he received. He has always lived very deliberately, and that was a great model for me. I’ve seen how people get sucked into wasting time on things that aren’t really what they want to be doing or even what they care about, or on things that won’t get them where they want to be in the long run. And when you have a family, it becomes so much more important to minimize the time you waste. As a result, I’m very strategic about almost everything. My energy goes into supporting my family in ways that complement my husband’s contributions, into helping my mother, and into keeping my writing/teaching career moving forward. I barely have anything even remotely resembling a social life anymore, which is a bummer, but that was what I was willing to sacrifice to have these other things.

What’s next on the horizon for you?

I have been working on a second book. I’ve done the research and preliminary writing, off and on, over the last few years. And I’m now beginning to see how it can work as a whole book and I’m getting very excited about what it could become. I also have a couple of month-long writing residencies coming up—one in upstate New York and one in Scotland! I’ve never done a residency before and I hope they’ll enable me to make some real progress on the new manuscript. Later this summer I’m going to be teaching an online personal essay class for Catapult! This class I dreamed up focuses on form, looking at lots of examples of different essay structures and encouraging students to try out new approaches. So it feels good that there are a lot of brand-new things for me to look forward to at the moment.

Photo credit: Grace Palmer