![]() “It’s not as though I can move on with my life reassured that they will never return, and that’s something that I wanted to get across in the book.” “I live with the constant fear of a relapse or a recurrence of these things,” she tells me. Her medical history, extensively described in the book, includes diagnoses of schizoaffective disorder and late-stage Lyme disease, both chronic. The 13 essays of The Collected Schizophrenias, winner of the 2016 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, chart how uncrossable the distance from bed to mirror has sometimes been for Wang. As she writes in her essay “High-Functioning”: “If I skip the lipstick, that means I haven’t even made it to the bathroom mirror.” I overdress in a natty black pantsuit to meet her at the Wing, a women-only workspace in San Francisco. In her second book, the essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf, Feb.), she articulates how “weaponized glamour” has armed her with a socially acceptable appearance even at her most unwell she once worked as a fashion writer and wears red lipstick under almost any conditions. ![]() I am nervously dressing myself to interview Esmé Weijun Wang. ![]()
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