Key Themes: bi-polar disorder, manic depression, schi-affective disorder, electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), medication, addiction WARNING: CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
""I would sit up all night and sometimes first thing in the morning just banging away at the keyboard hoping to loosen the chains of a mind that had condemned itself. I was in hell and all I could do was stay in that agonizing position and keep writing, so I knew I was still alive."" - Michele Koh
Description
'Rotten Jellybeans' is a comical and surreal adventure into the madcap world of teenage girlhood. Michele Koh looks at her rapid and frightening descent into drug addiction and manic depression with raw and punchy honesty. This collection of 22 short stories and poems about drugs, love, sex and insanity is perhaps a tale that every single young girl making that transition into womanhood can understand. Dark, funny and delightful.
About the Author
Michele Koh is a journalist who has written for publications like Psychologies and Harper's Bazaar. She is also a scriptwriter and a children's book illustrator. Michele was editor of the LCC News at the London College of Communication, where she graduated in journalism in 2007.
Born in Singapore in 1978, she attended an all girls' convent school and began working in television as a children's show host when she was 11. In her late teens, Michele was diagnosed with bipolar schizo-affective disorder and underwent 7 treatments of electro-convulsive therapy. In the following years she grappled with behavioral addictions, and dependency on prescription drugs. It was during the nadir of her illness that Michele began to write.
Book Extract
"Stereo GuySays
These days are pretty normal. I have a routine to them. I look forward to dinner, to the wine that accompanies dinner, then accompanies me upstairs to what I call 'flagrant delicto' time. Flagrant delicto means caught red handed. I checked it up in the dictionary after reading 'The Magus'. I decided after Geoff left that my room was too teenage with all the movie posters and mad magazines. I removed all the posters, but they left cracks and chips in my wall where the plaster fell off, so I spent three days plastering the cracks with blue-tack, and mixing my water colour paint till it was the same colour as the walls and painted over the blue-tack. I threw out my comics and picture books and bought novels instead. Authors with exotic sounding names like Milan Kundera, Haruki Mirakumi, Vikram Seth, Ben Okri, David Malouf, Patrick Suskind and John Fowles. I also bought language tapes. French, German, Japanese, Italian and Spanish, and I was going to learn them all in half a year. I started listening to classical music. I was going to make myself a lady.
The hero in 'The Magus' is having a meal in a greek villa - wine, meat and cheese - and I have fixed myself a meal of gorgonzola, pear and cold cuts, feeling like I am in the book. I feel a little restless because it's that time of day, when the sky changes from violet to mauve that I lose myself a little again. I go upstairs with my wine and I feel a twinge of guilt, like I have something to hide. The guilt I feel comes from being aware that locked in my room I'm in that place again where reality is pleasantly distorted. I drink, not quite high. It's the pills - my zopiclones and valiums. The sedatives keep me out of trouble.Ever since the psychiatrist gave me these pills, I no longer need to leave the house looking for heroin or pot. It makes life so much easier.
