Main description:

The Rapids is an exploration of manic depression (also known as bipolar disorder). With reflections on artists such as Carrie Fisher, Kanye West, Saul Bellow, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Spalding Gray, Sam Twyford-Moore takes readers on a literary and cultural tour of mania and what it means to live with a diagnosis of "bipolarity" in contemporary society. He also looks at the condition in our digital world, where someone's manic episode can unfold live in real time, watched by millions.

His own story, told unflinchingly, is shocking and sometimes darkly comic. It gives the book an edge that is not always comfortable but full of insight and empathy. Smart, lively, and well-researched, The Rapids manages to be both a wild ride and introspective at once, exploring a condition that touches thousands of people, directly or indirectly.

Contents:

Ways of Being Seen
1. Let us now open on a naked man on a street corner in San Diego

Ways of Reading
2. Black backpack, crowbar, torch, book
3. A short tour through the cultural history of manic depression
4. Rapid thought generator: Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift and Kanye West's The Life of Pablo

Ways of Seeing
5. It's just too fucking too: Mania in cinema and the films of Paul Thomas Anderson
6. Under her influence

Ways of Being
7. Speak, Spalding!
8. The Reckoning
9. Carrie F [October 21, 1956-December 27, 2016]

Two Lives
10. This is all to say that I do not know the story at all

A Life
11. The rapids: a coda in cuts

Author's note
Works consulted
Acknowledgments