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Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir
Author(s): Kerry Neville (Author)
- Publisher: Madville Publishing
- Publication Date: October 21, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 268 pages
- ISBN-10: 1963695410
- ISBN-13: 9781963695410
Book Description
Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir is an inventive and striking memoir about motherhood, madness, and the grace of second and third chances. Kerry Neville shares the story of how she was caught in the perfect storm of bipolar disorder, anorexia, and alcoholism when her children were young and her marriage failing and how she found her way back to joy and hope. Electric shock therapy, hospitalizations, and even an exorcism were desperate, if failed, lifelines. But even in that dark chaos, she held fast to an abiding belief in love and fought to regain her own life and her life with her children.
Editorial Reviews
Review
MAY BE MAD by Kerry Neville
RELEASE DATE: Oct. 21, 2025
An unusually intriguing and poignant memoir.
Neville reflects on her life and mental illness in this memoir.
“Electric Shock Treatments erased years of my linear memory,” writes the author in the book’s opening lines, adding that her unreliable reminiscence is a “chaotic approximation” of an incomplete, “jerry-rigged record” (the mercurial quality of the text reflects her battle with bipolar disorder). While the basic elements of a memoir are present—the narrative covers the author’s evolution from an angsty teenager to a successful writer, professor of English, and Fulbright Scholar—what stands out is Neville’s commentary on and exploration of common human experiences. The opening essay, for instance, grapples with the ephemeral nature of memory itself, blending the author’s own medically assisted efforts to remember the past with neuroscience’s scene construction theory and the broader implications of human autonoetic consciousness. The book’s most powerful sections survey the deeply personal aspects of Neville’s life, from the complicated postpartum relationship with her then-husband (who is simply referred to as “X”) to suicidal ideations to the ways in which “bipolar’s annihilating death grip” affects her self-perception (“A Facebook post on one of my smug feel-good-recovery days,” she notes, reads like “sound-bite profundity” on a down day). Neville has an eclectic, genre-defying writing style—an accomplished poet and short-story writer, she pushes the boundaries and rules of grammar (reflecting on the nature of memory, she writes, “The self becomes erratic and unstable: no I, just iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…”). The memoir eschews chronological organization—the narrative can traverse dozens of topics in just a handful of pages. A trip to Flannery O’Connor’s home, for instance, triggers recollections of the author’s Catholic upbringing, her experiences with exorcisms, and her self-diagnosis of subclinical graphomania in the course of four pages. While sometimes disorienting, this approach (which also interrupts the text with the occasional poem or reproduction of a journal entry) effectively allows readers into Neville’s brilliant, if often tortured, mind.
An unusually intriguing and poignant memoir.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781963695410
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
Publisher’s Weekly: Booklife
May Be Mad: a memoir
Neville, Kerry
There’s a searing urgency to Neville’s memoir that pulls readers into her fractious state of mind, piecing together her chaotic mental health struggles from a near-miraculous perspective of stability. When Neville is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she recognizes the “racing thoughts, insomnia, impulsivity, mania, depression, suicidality”—and knows that they’re compounded by her alcoholism and anorexia. She tries therapy and medication, is hospitalized multiple times, and even submits to a “desperate exorcism (bona fide with priest!).” The slew of “unasked-for-but-miraculous interventions” she’s subjected to include the frightening process of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT); it doesn’t cure her, but along with antipsychotics, it does make “soupy mush” of her memory.
A visit to Flannery O’Connor’s house crystalizes the hope that Neville clings to: “A conscious, unquestioning (yes, oxymoron) faith in the belief that what is coming… will also offer the possibility (but only the possibility, no guarantee) of salvation.” Much of that process involves writing, and after two short story collections (
As Neville recounts how her husband and two young children were affected by her mental health, her narrative jumps between recent years and her childhood, incorporating journal entries, poetry, candid letters, and asides into this raw memoir of vulnerability and resourcefulness. She’s achieved her dreams of becoming a writer, traveling, and learning more about her Irish background, while frankly documenting what it took her to get there. There’s nothing soothing about this recovery narrative—her prose is all jagged edges—but it is comforting: Neville lived to tell her story and shines a light for those who follow.
Takeaway: Harrowing recovery memoir extols honest writing as path to peace.
Comparable Titles: Bassey Ikpi’s I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying, Daphne Merkin’s This Close to Happy.
Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
