Hearing voices

This week I read Your Voice in my Head by Emma Forrest. Let's be clear about something from the beginning, I'm convinced that the cover of this book is going to ensure that 90% less people pick it up than actually should. Oh Bloomsbury, it looks like your garden variety young adult fiction at best. After it arrived on my desk I quickly judged it as not appropriate for the magazine nor interesting to me. I had placed it deep in a stack headed for the office free table when an email from the publicist intervened with some glowing  reviews. 

See, in the UK people know who Emma Forrest is and, unlike the cover might suggest, she's really cool and enormously accomplished. She was first published in The London Evening Standard when she was 13 - an interview with Madonna no less. Shortly after that she got her own column called 'Generation X' in the Sunday Times where she interviewed various indie bands. This is her third book and she's been published in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Elle, Harper's Bazaar and NME. These days she's also a well respected  screen writer and famously had a very tumultous and public relationship with Colin Farrell. (Oh, how you'll hate him by the end of reading this. In fact I'm typing with one hand right now so I can shake my fist at him with the other). 

As much success as she's had this isn't a memoir about the good times as, perhaps, the Getty-images-esque cover might suggest. It's about Emma's struggles with mental illness, her sadness at losing the one man she felt could "save her" and the relationships that moved her forwards and backwards. It's funny and fascinating and especially good if you can identify or are particularly familiar with the dysfunctional goings-on inside the minds of very creative people. On the downside, at times, it feels so self indulgent you may well consider partaking in the self harm and anti-depressants yourself. Look, it's an easy read and worth enduring the darkness if only to make you feel a little better about the state of your own mental health. Also, here's an alternative cover that you can get in the UK or buy online (not available in Australia). Yeh, that's more like it.

Apparently it will soon be made in to a movie. I wonder if Colin Farrell would be interested in  the role of Colin Farrell? He could do with the lesson in self awareness. 

Here's the lovely Emma chatting about meeting Patti Smith and the purpose of the book.