The best “fun” books on living with or living with someone with a mental disorder

This memoir which reads like a novel is a case study in life being stranger than fiction. Many memoirs on mental illness are self-indulgent and frankly boring. This bizarre recounting of an unimaginable childhood is a rollercoaster ride of joy and peril. Like a goldfish looking out at a carnival, waiting for that ping pong ball to land on its head, Burroughs narrates with such natural humor that nearly every horrific part of the story is just darn fun. If you want a book that inspires, entertains, and might just make you feel better about your own life, you’ve found it! 

The most amazing aspect of this novel is that it’s written by a dude named Wally who presents as a man but clearly knows what goes on in a woman’s head—and body. Not an easy feat for a lot of writers. Take Hemmingway—he knew as much about women as Mars knows about Venus. Nearly every facet of the protagonist Dolores Price’s life from the age of four to forty is spot on. Perhaps I personally mesh with this novel because I too came of age in the late 60s to early 70s, which was an especially wacky and challenging time for women. You’ll laugh more than cringe as you follow Dolores through her tortured evolution, and I promise, it will stay with you for decades.

Why may you ask is this book listed in my “fun” books about mental illness? There are those who might say, “When they forced me to read this novel in high school, the only fun things were the naughty words!” I beg to differ. Salinger was a master of bitterly dark humor. Holden Caulfield poking fun at “phonies” and adults as he struggles to maintain his sanity is timeless. Come on, what’s not fun about Ackley’s pimples or halitosis? A rawer version of Peter Pan, this classic story should still be on every young person’s reading list. 

Beautiful, heart-wrenching, and masterfully written this memoir starts with twenty-eight-year-old MacLean waking up in a train station in India. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. MacLean doesn’t waste any time diving into the terror and the humor of his situation. He becomes increasingly ill and is eventually placed in a psychiatric hospital in Hyderabad. Turns out he’s had a rare reaction to the anti-malarial drug Lariam. Fun, right? With lines like, “Faking sanity isn’t as hard as it might seem. You just have to shut up.” You betcha it’s fun! 

On the surface, this bizarre novel is nothing more than an outrageously long comment on a cooking blog. But it is so much more. The “wedding crasher”—who is never given a name—doesn’t attend the wedding; he invades the couple’s wedding blog with increasingly insidious cyberspace shenanigans. This laugh-out-loud tirade is an addictive journey into the mind of a very lonely, frankly unlikable man. The More You Ignore Me brilliantly and hilariously examines the inner workings of a delusional and grandiose individual. Reminiscent of the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera, Nichols successfully creates a character worth hating and a character almost—but not quite—worthy of empathy.