When Sonya Sones was thirteen, her elder sister had a breakdown, suddenly showing severe symptoms of a mental illness that was diagnosed as manic depression. Her sister was hospitalized and her family was became dysfunctional almost overnight. Sonya kept a detailed journal of her thoughts at the time. Many years later she started to write poetry, and Stop Pretending tells the story of this time in her life through a series of poems.

The poems are literal and straightfoward. It would be possible to put the words into sentences and turn the book into a short story in the form of a series of snapshots of feelings. For example:
MASS PIKE

On the way home from the hospital / my father starts crying so hard / that he has to pull over / by the side of the road, / and we weep with him / while cars filled / with happy families / whiz past.

Obviously the spacing of the lines in a poem influence its emotional impact, but I suspect the book would have just about as much power if it was converted into a booklet in prose form. My point is not meant to denigrate the poetry, although it doesn’t seem very poetic to me. Rather, it is to say that the power of the work rests very largely on the content of the story and the words she uses.

Sones describes her experience well. We get to understand her worry for her sister, her loneliness, her fear that she will turn out to be crazy like her sister, her alarm at her parents’ arguments, her thrill when she gets a boyfriend, and her happiness when her sister starts to improve and she can have a real conversation with her again.

This book could be helpful to parents as well as children in families which experience severe mental illness. There’s no surprises here about what a young girl might feel when her sister has a breakdown, but Sones’ words do a good job at communicating those feelings.

Categories: Fiction, MentalHealth