by Terri Cheney.

William Morrow. 245 pages. $24.95.

BY EDWARD J. RENEHAN JR.
Special to the Journal

Terri Cheney was the classic overachiever. First she attended Vassar, then law school. Later she became a high-powered Hollywood attorney. But while at Vassar she developed a severe eating disorder. Even before college she had suffered from long bouts of depression. In the end, Cheney wound up being diagnosed as bipolar/manic-depressive — a condition from which this reviewer likewise suffers.

Bipolar disorders are an incurable category of mood disorders that involve a “cycling” between profound gloom and extreme euphoria. In the manic phases, patients are apt to be highly irritable. They are also likely to be personally, sexually or financially reckless, and a danger to themselves.

Especially dreaded is the so-called “mixed state,” which consists of all the agitation of mania without the euphoria, thus tripling the pain and self-hate inherent in depression, and often leading to suicide.

As Cheney reveals in her superb new book, Manic: A Memoir, she spent a great deal of time in the mixed state, and made several very real attempts to kill herself.

In her manic moments, she frequently embarked upon ill-conceived sexual adventures, spent lavishly, and reveled in the utterly false grandiosity with which all those thus afflicted are horribly familiar. Cheney also embarrassed herself in public, wound up raped or nearly raped more than once, and even met with arrest. When she was depressed, she could barely muster the strength (or ambition) to return phone messages at work.

Various mixes of drugs failed to moderate Cheney’s condition. Eventually, she even tried electroshock (or ECT) therapy, which only made things worse. ECT triggered “the most severe manic episode of my life. Previous episodes had lasted several days. . . . This one lasted weeks” and ended with another suicide attempt. Cheney downed a hoard of stockpiled pills. “They tell me my exterminator found me. I love the irony of that. . . . Instead of spiders, he found me, sprawled on the living room carpet, with blood and foam coming out of my mouth.”

For someone who has wrestled with the same demons, Cheney’s book reeks with scary deja vu. It is all here: The sudden, unexpected, rapid-cycling flights into sadness, fits of rage, or mad schemes. The crushing, anxious desperation and futility. The dizzying euphoria that lifts you ever higher as your endorphins pop like fireworks near the top, where the world is yours, and you are a superhero, answerable to no one.

Cheney’s remarkable chronicle of her painful odyssey is as eloquent as it is brave. It is also profoundly necessary, both for her and for us. “Telling my story is what’s kept me alive, even when death was at its most seductive,” Cheney writes. “That’s why I’ve chosen to share my personal history, although some of it is still painful to recall. . . . But the disease thrives on shame, and shame thrives on silence, and I’ve been silent long enough.” MANIC: A Memoir,