Jessie Tu

But I think, I mean, I still loved it.

It just didn't hit me across the face in the way that I thought it would.

I have several books going at once towards the beginning of the year.

I like Mark.

I made a list of all the things that I'd read, but then that slowly trickled, like my record keeping slowly kind of dwindled away.

But at the moment, I'm reading a collection of essays by a Taiwanese-American essayist called Esme Weijun Wang, and it's called The Collected Schizophrenias.

And basically, it charts her experience with schizophrenia and

throughout her life.

She's only in her 40s, I believe, but it's so intense, it's so poignant, it's such a beautiful sort of melting pot of academic facts and her own personal experiences.

But I think I was drawn to this book particularly because I'm always hungry and in search of very explicit, memoiristic writing from the perspective of an Asian woman living in a

I know that in Asian context and in a lot of regions in Asia, mental illness is very, very taboo.

There's no language around it.

People don't openly discuss it.

And so this was very comforting to read.

But I picked it up actually because I'm writing my second novel where my main character does suffer from mental illness.

So I thought that that was useful research.

Yeah, she does this so brilliantly.

When I opened up the book and started reading, it really strikes me that it seemed very cinematic in the way that Johnson sets up the description of the house in this new context.

It's very haunting and

The way in which she uses language and the ways in which she manages to kind of corporeally describe the house, it's, like you said, so uncanny the way she draws elements of the human body and uses that to describe this.