In Mouthing the Words (Heinemann, £12.99), her heroine Thelma has suffered every emotional indignity life can throw at a girl (multiple-personality disorder, incest, anorexia, nervous breakdown, attempted suicide).
Not once in this dead-pan, hilarious story of mental breakdown, attempted suicide and slow recovery do you doubt that the narrator is sane and the society which surrounds her, the one which 'Electrocuted the Rosenbergs' and now wants to break her into a woman's shape, is crazed.
Gerry Conlon, falsely convicted of the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings, has also talked of breakdowns, attempted suicide and struggles with addiction after 15 years in prison.
Yet life there for haoles (foreigners) was not unlike that of bluebloods summering in Maine: Moore and her four siblings roamed the landscape at will, while their mother, prone to nervous breakdowns, attempted to outfit them in seersucker shorts.
She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide.
In the years after the filming, she had a breakdown, made attempts at suicide and fell into drug addiction.
There were breakdowns, suicide attempts, spells in asylums.
(Jean Boudin suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide when her daughter was a child).
En route to the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, Charlton's adoptive father, who had become his coach, suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide.
Pulling is seriously uncomfortable viewing at times (breakdowns, suicide attempts, stalking, the actions of the kind of family members that can only be described as "Lynne Perrie meets Wolverine", etc) yet it's definitely worth persevering with.
