Meet Your Icons
Heroes, Doechii and a poem
Hii, I’m writing to you today from bed. I’m waiting (trying) patiently for surgery —2/2 for the year (fingers crossed). Luckily I’m pet-sitting and the view is beautiful and the animals are sweeties.
I have four drafts on the go for Trainwrecks that I haven’t finished and don’t want to, today, so I’m sending you a collection of things. Some music, my icons and a poem I’ve been working on. I have a feeling there are going to be spelling/grammar mistakes in here (sorry).
I was thinking about representation this morning. I remembered a moment from almost a decade ago, when a friend slid Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir An Unquiet Mind, onto my bedside table. Quite an unconventional way of telling me they thought I was mentally unwell, but I read it in a day and it changed the course of my life. So I’ve put together a list of people with links to their work who I admire and go to when I’m feeling average. I wanted to clarify that I’m not saying that you have to go through intense suffering to be talented. I am trying to point out that important art can and does emerge from people who work at a different pace because of health realities.
Kay Redfield Jamison — Psychologist, Writer
Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind broke ground as one of the first insider accounts of living with bipolar disorder by a clinical psychologist. She’s spent her career writing about mood disorders, suicide, and the links between creativity and madness. She folds her lived experience into science in a way that changed the course of my life.
Stephen Fry — Actor, Writer, Comedian
Stephen Fry has been open about living with bipolar disorder, exploring it in the documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. His career spans comedy, acting, and memoir, marked by wit and vulnerability. Heuses humour and openness to make mental illness less frightening and more human.
BBC documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive.
Lucia Berlin — Short Story Writer
Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women brought her cult status posthumously. Her stories mine working-class life, addiction, motherhood, and the grit of survival. Berlin’s fiction is never far from her biography with alcoholism, poverty, single parenting.
Guardian Review of A Manual for Cleaning Women.
Nick Cave — Musician, Songwriter
Nick Cave’s career with The Bad Seeds is steeped in themes of loss, death, love, and redemption. He’s been candid about heroin addiction, depression, and the shattering grief of losing his son.
The Red Hand Files, his ongoing letters on grief, creativity, and survival.
Yayoi Kusama — Artist
Kusama is one of the most recognised contemporary artists, famous for her polka dots, infinity rooms, and hallucinatory installations. She has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo since the 1970s. Kusama has said her art is both expression and therapy where her hallucinations become immersive worlds that invite others into her obsessions.
Megan O’Rourke — Memoirist, Chronic Illness Journalist
Megan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom chronicles her years as a patient—bedbound, misdiagnosed, chasing answers through autoimmune labyrinths. She excavates not just her own story, but the systemic failure that traps millions of “invisible” patients. Her illness is the form through which she interrogates medicine, memoir, and social justice.
Frida Kahlo — Painter
Frida Kahlo’s paintings are iconic self-portraits of suffering, sexuality, and defiance. After polio and a near-fatal bus accident, she lived with lifelong pain and disability. Kahlo painted her body as it was (broken, stitched, bleeding etc) and in doing so made illness and disability central to 20th-century art.
Audre Lorde — Poet, Essayist
Audre Lorde’s work—poetry, essays, speeches—explored race, gender, sexuality, and survival. She wrote The Cancer Journals after her breast cancer diagnosis insisting that bodies marked by sickness, race, gender, and queerness are not to be silenced or reduced.
My Top 3 Songs for the Week
New Poem
My friend and I have a note pinned to the top of our messenger chat that says:
It’s quite an intense thing to see daily but also… true. I think about facing reality and living in denial a lot. I’ve started this poem about how random and devastating reality can be, but its a million times better than being stuck in denial. So here it is, I’d loove your feedback, I think it’s better read out loud but we’ll see.
What if I told you /
It’s a long hard look in the mirror
It’s asking ChatGPT to take your virginity.
It’s making the front page next to Jarod Fogel
and a ten-cent Subway coupon.It’s landing the lead in a biopic on your own murder.
It’s testing positive for Munchausen
and knowing all you needed was love, love, loveIt’s the 1% doing the 40-hour famine.
It’s having joseph smith jr and the entire mormon church in your downline
It’s sipping vape juice through a straw on a Zumba cruise.
It’s marrying up and inheriting a Ponzi scheme.
It’s sticking a knife in a toaster and expecting an orgasm.It’s breath-play with a goose-down maternity pillow.
It’s being so mad with yourself you fuck a man.It’s being voted prom queen on the psych ward,
in a tiara made of plastic forks.It’s a runaway bride in a six-car pile-up
on the motorway, leading to a life beyond your wildest dreams.It’s pink bath-water and undiagnosed chlamydia,
it’s shrinking and a king-hit sucker-punch
to the back of the knees.It’s wet-cardboard for a spine,
jelly-skeleton,
botched-filler-job, reality TV contract.And I’ll take it… because denial’s a cunt you can curl up in,
to be shot into a Bangkok sex show, without your passport,
And only your bare naked ass.And the memories, of all the time, you spent
thinking about… what she thought… about you.