Photo: Jacquelyn Tierney
Unlike some firsthand accounts, Esmé Weijun Wang’s bestselling new book,The Collected Schizophrenias, isn’t about overcoming illness — instead it’s an inside look at how she successfully lives with an incurable condition, schizoaffective disorder.
Not long ago Wang was in bed at home in San Franscisco, where she lives with her husband, Chris, 37, when she saw a huge swarm of flies.
“This giant swarm of flies came in and started crawling on the bed—I was terrified,” she says. “I was like, ‘Did we leave a window open? What happened?’ I jumped up and flipped on the light. They were everywhere. Then they disappeared.”
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A graduate of Stanford, Wang experienced her first hallucination while in her dorm room. She says that she was taking a shower when she heard a voice say, “I hate you.” Wang was finally diagnosed in 2013, after she told her psychiatrist she felt unsure “that anything… was real,” herself included.
“Having concerns with whether I had a face,” Wang wrote in an email, “and . . . agitated at the prospect of other faces.” It was the beginning of a psychotic episode that lasted 10 months.
For more of Wang’s story, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on stands now.
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Wang relies on medications and therapy—along with watching cooking shows likeThe Great British Bakeoff, because they are “very grounded in reality”– to help keep her functioning at a level that is unusually high for her disorder. The regimen also helps her focus on her writing. A full-time author, she’s now working on her second novel.
ButThe Collected Schizophreniasis her most personal work yet. In it, Wang recounts her personal struggles while also examining the history and sociology of schizophrenia and its affiliated disorders.
“I wanted to help demystify an illness that’s terrifying for so many, including people who have it,” she says. “It’s rarely described from the sufferer’s point of view. It was a book I myself had been looking for.”
The Collected Schizophreniasison salenow.
source: people.com
