To answer my unsolved questions, as I had done my whole life, I turned to literature. I turned to the women I had long imagined as a council of mothers: Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara. They had advised me, consoled me, sustained me, saved me before. I needed them now more than ever. And, I turned to memoirs of madness.

In his memoir Darkness Visible, William Styron argues that depression, despite the cold, precise terms in which we currently discuss it, is more than anything a disease of disorder and loss of control. He writes that “our perhaps understandable modern need to dull the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness.

In a key letter, written to his brother and sister-in-law when he was twenty-three, he [Keats] said that being intelligent is not enough. Your intelligence has to be converted into a soul. “Do you not see,” he wrote, “how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?...Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making.

Mary Shelley offers an extraordinary model for responding to a world out of control and the resulting discouragement. At the turning-point in her life she wrote in her diary, “I must change.” And she did. The change didn’t come about automatically or at will. She had to work hard at making a life of her own, crafting a presence in the world and a sense of her own character and destiny.

She was mesmerised by his focused intent, the combination of a strict work ethic with an unstructured moral code. While his subject was before him, they were all-important. ‘The aura given out by a person or an object is as much a part of them as their flesh,’ he once wrote. ‘The effect they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell. The effect in space of two different individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and a light bulb.’

Once Sophie had started an affair with Lucian, she too quickly realised that he was incapable of sticking to one sexual partner. ‘I was intensely involved but aware that other people were involved too. You don’t know things and just have to work them out. You’re not quite sure what’s going on. When Lucian was out of the room I would look at the paintings turned against the wall and see a bit more of someone’s breast. It would make me terribly jealous. He gave a lot of attention when you were there with him, but when you weren’t then you knew there was a whole other life happening. That was tough,’ she said.

Like so many of the novels Morrison published, Tragic Magic situates the reader in a well-crafted fictional world that allows us to see the main character’s interior life. The narration holds the reader so closely that we cannot help but to see what Mouth sees— that the cost of preserving an exacting masculinity is high. It is impossible for any of the men in the novel to establish and maintain intimate relationships with women or anyone because they are so guarded on the one hand and disappointed in their ability to live up to the impossible standard on the other.