Writing Like Mad

British author gives insider's view of dysfunctional mental health system

The truth shall make you free? Not in Clare Allan's world.

"Well, my truth, maybe ..." She laughs but there's an edge to it. "No. I don't think it does. This idea that if you have all the facts you have the truth ... whose truth? Who decides?"

"Who is mad? Who is sane? Who decides?" is the marketing mantra for Allan's bestselling first novel, Poppy Shakespeare, hailed by one British reviewer as portraying "the mentally ill with both raucous humour and with an empathy altogether lacking in sentimentality."

KEITH BEATY/TORONTO STAR Clare Allan's experiences with mental illness inform her hysterically funny, occasionally horrifying first novel, Poppy Shakespeare, but she is adamant that it is not a memoir.

It's published in Canada by Bond Street Books, an imprint of Doubleday. What gives it particular piquancy is that Allan writes from an insider's point of view, though she insists, "It's not a memoir. Not at all."

But her own slide into mental illness began 11 years ago, when she was 26, and she acknowledges that without that experience, horrific as it was, she couldn't have written her book. Still, she insists, "it's not a satire of mental illness. It's a satire of the system. And, by extension, any government system."

Inevitably, Poppy Shakespeare has been described as a cross between One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Catch-22. But there's far more of the latter than the former.

Poppy Shakespeare is set in the fictitious Dorothy Fish day hospital for mental patients in north London. The narrator, known only as N, is one of them. She speaks the language of the streets. The novel begins: "I'm not being funny, but you can't blame me for what happened. All I done was try and help Poppy out. Same as I would of anyone, ain't my fault is it, do you know what I'm saying, not making like Mother Teresa, but that's how I am."

N is savvy enough to work the system so she can stay among the "dribblers," the other long-term day-patients. Poppy, on the other hand, "stropping in them doors with her six-inch skirt and her twelve-inch heels," is desperate to prove there's nothing wrong with her so she can get back to her life and young daughter.

This is where the Catch-22 comes in. To hire a lawyer to prove she's not insane, she needs "MAD money" from the Ministry for the Advancement of the Deranged and she can only get that by being certified mentally ill.

Allan, who lives in London, had a comfortable upbringing in England. Her mother is an archaeologist, her father a mathematician. She went to boarding school and university, leaving with a degree in English.

She remembers the moment, on Tottenham Court Rd. in London, when her world collapsed.

"Obviously, it had been inside me for some time," she says. "I'd been struggling to find a way to exist. You leave your education at whatever age and you have to account for your existence. Not just making a living. I didn't imagine existing at all. I don't mean suicidal, just ... not existing. That moment when it really started ... it struck me that I needed sunglasses, desperately. It was all I could imagine to protect me. They were at the back of the shop and I was pushing past people to get to them."

She describes it now as "a breakdown. A very, very bad one. I think specific diagnoses can be quite dangerous. Once you put a label on someone -paranoia, schizophrenia- you stop understanding and start making assumptions. You can't direct it into boxes. Two different doctors might give you two different diagnoses. It's not as if you can do an x-ray and say, `Oh yes, it's this or that.'"

The years that followed were a nightmare mix of hospital stays and daily attendance at a hospital like the Dorothy Fish, "a very destructive place to be. There was no sort of real therapy. The system is so much about power. There's an extreme division. Any kind of competence or confidence in the patient is a threat and will be stamped out."

Allan had written for the Guardian and had two unpublished novels. But when she called herself a writer, that was taken as a symptom of her instability. She talks about it now without rancour, even smiling at the thought.