Unbalancing Act

Alcide is in his forties. He still sometimes sleeps in his mother’s bed. He takes seven pills a day – five in the morning, two after dinner – medication that allows him to remain ‘a lucid, alert and cooperative patient with fluid speech’.

From his exile in a small town in Abruzzo, where nothing ever seems to change, Alcide recounts the grey monotony of his days. The hours spent at the library trying to write or exhausting himself at the gym, attempting to regain in muscle what he has lost in mental lucidity.

Above all, he describes what happens when his mental equilibrium skews off balance: the onset of paranoia, the doubled perception, the way stillness is never truly still, because that is when thoughts surge in.

A publishing sensation in Italy, Unbalancing Act is a harrowing, gut-wrenching deep dive into the everyday realities of severe mental illness, replete with startlingly fresh images and compelling reflections on the divide between mind and body, and what it means to inhabit a brain that continuously balks and bucks.