About the book
Nigerian-American poet Bassey Ikpi tells her life story in essays shaped by her diagnoses of bipolar II and anxiety. She moves from early childhood in Nigeria and an adolescence in Oklahoma, through household tensions and swings between euphoria and depression, to her twenties as a spoken word performer touring with HBO's Def Poetry Jam. Behind that confident stage presence her mental health was declining, and a breakdown led to hospitalization and the diagnosis. The essays take up shame, confusion, medication and family, and question what counts as normal. Announced under the title Making Friends With Giants, the memoir was later renamed and reached the New York Times best seller list.
Tarana Burke, founder of the Me Too movement, endorsed it as a book of many layers, whether a reader comes for its African-born childhood in America, a gifted writer's rise or its account of bipolar II.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Tarana Burke (Founder/the Me Too Movement)
I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying is a richness of layers, rewarding the reader no matter which particular thread got you here: the experience of being African-born and raised in America, the coming up of a gifted writer and performer, tracing the lineage of mental illness through several generations, or the fleshing out of the literal highs and lows of bipolar II. Like kudzu, symptoms blossom and lace themselves through Ikpi’s accomplishments and griefs, strangulating her from life’s sustenance (food, friends, sleep). Her vivid, heart-racing chapters on the living, breathing moments of bipolar, particularly ‘This is What Happens,’ will be assigned in coursework for years to come. Bassey Ikpi’s writing is a revelation, a thrill, devastating and uproarious, lively in its accurate depiction of the lack of boundaries between the terrible and the hilarious. I’m Telling the Truth is a feat, and will soon be the favorite book of many. It is already one of mine.
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