The Sad Stays

“I cannot promise this is exactly how it happened, but you can trust this is exactly how it felt.”

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In The Sad Stays, Ashley Lumpkin weaves prose and poetry, intake form and erasure, screenplay and hymn, to explore the experience of living with mental illness. At turns humorous and heart-rending, this inventive memoir presents a portrait of bipolar disorder beyond its popular misconceptions.

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Lumpkin invites us into her conversations with doctors, therapists, and friends, and we witness the effects the illness has on her relationships, both romantic and platonic. She wrestles with questions of identity, faith, and responsibility in the face of a disease she can barely control.

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The Sad Stays offers us a new, lyrical lens through which to comprehend a widely stigmatized and misunderstood illness.