`` Marbles `` An Artist s Struggle With The Effect Of...

In Marbles, Ellen Forney shares the story of an artist’s struggle with the effects of bipolar disorder on her abilities. Initially afraid of confronting the possibility that choosing to control her condition may extinguish her creativity, Forney chooses to isolate her experience from those of others. This fear and the resulting loneliness being unsustainable, Forney eventually makes the decision to explore the work of others and finds comfort in their experiences. Ultimately, she constructs her own work as a form of therapy that can help her come to terms with her own bipolar disorder, definitively resolving the question of whether it is possible to be a stable yet creative artist. In this context, Forney theorizes her memoir as a form of company in order to embrace her unrelenting condition as being an essential part of her identity. Forney’s suffering arises not just from the symptoms of her bipolar disorder, but from the self-isolation that results from her fear of losing her creativity. After her diagnosis, Forney characterizes herself as a â€Å"rock star† cheerfully eating an energy bar and casually tossing Klonopin into her mouth (28). With the same carelessness, she begins reading Kay Jamison’s memoir, a story by a psychologist who suffers from the same disorder as she. Here, Forney’s face shows a dismissive skepticism, betraying her adamant refusal to let her disorder â€Å"dictate everything in [her] life† (27-28). Her reasons for this refusal become readily apparent when we