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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

MOMMA MAY BE MAD

Kerry Neville

A Memoir

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.

Kerry Neville is the author of two collections of stories, Necessary Lies, which received the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize and was named a ForeWord Magazine Short Story Book of the Year, and Remember to Forget Me. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Gettysburg Review, Epoch, TriQuarterly, Brevity, The Washington Post, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. Her fiction and nonfiction have been named Notables in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.

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Book Published 2025-10-21 by Madville Publishing

Comments

Momma May Be Mad is one of the most vivid, alive memoirs I have ever read, a recovery story that depicts recovery as it really happens: in fits and starts and spirals and half-sentences that, with any luck, eventually take the form of a new life. Kerry Neville's voice is both fierce and playful, elegant and unsparing; she has the confidence of a master, and for good reason. A hard-won joy suffuses these pages, and by the time I reached the end, I felt suffused with Neville's light and hope, too.

Kerry Neville is a writer of immense power, and this is a work of aching, transcendent beauty. This is less a memoir than a hand-held journey through the life of an extraordinary woman, through history, science, philosophy, the workings of mankind and the world we share, and the worlds we create for ourselves. To quote her description of a bee's flight, she "retranslates the language of gravity and weight into the language of light and radiance." I envy anyone who has the pleasure ahead of them of reading this magnificent book for the first time.

Kerry Neville has written a book about looking at the face of death, from every angle, and coming out of that experience alive, awake to the world in all its mystery. That emergence doesn't happen through any of the expected portals, but through an engagement with a place, a culture, and a language she describes as both dying and rising at the same time. "When did I decide I deserved pain more than beauty?" Neville asks, and piece after piece, she takes us to someplace approaching wholeness - or is it home? A stunning, singular achievement.

This memoir changed my life. It is Art; it is also life. In it, the central question is: How do we piece ourselves together after years of emotional and mental splintering? Neville recounts - in raw, revelatory prose - the self-nourishment made possible through the help of therapy and the love of her children. Her healing is further aided by her exploration of philosophy, history, science, and, importantly, language and its metaphors, which enliven this compelling and wise narrative. Neville writes herself out of loss and despair and toward a hard-won lifeforce that artfully illuminates these pages.

Kerry Neville makes of dark matter a truly stunning memoir of hope and renewal, a work shot through with light, like a stained-glass window. Devoid of even one moment of sentimentality or falseness, the writing is as clear-eyed as it is memorable. She sees beyond surfaces, down to depths, up to immensities. The exactitude in her deployment of the brittle medium called language is not just constantly impressive but is uplifting and replenishing. This unflinchingly courageous book from a writer whose work I love gives life to the profound truth that art can be redemptive.