Living with complex illness and surviving to tell about it: Anna Spargo-Ryan's chronic optimism
- Written by Kylie Cardell, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Flinders University
Anna Spargo-Ryan has been managing multiple mental health conditions since childhood, a lifetime of surviving an unwell brain. A recent diagnosis of ADHD, however, comes with fresh (though not unexpected) anguish.
Review: A Kind of Magic – Anna Spargo-Ryan (Ultimo Press).
On Twitter, Spargo-Ryan characteristically cracks a joke:
Later that same day, she lets rip:
Anna Spargo-Ryan.
Ultimo Press
Nonetheless, memoirs about mental illness have increasingly drawn attention to how gendered stereotypes affect the quality of care and reduce positive outcomes for women. In Hysteria, for example, Katerina Bryant investigates and critiques the historical legacy of medical misogyny. Kylie Maslen, in her memoir Show Me Where it Hurts, explores how gendered stereotypes continue to limit the ways women are treated or believed within medical institutions, particularly when the illness is “invisible”.
A Kind of Magic tackles disturbing and challenging themes to draw attention to them and advocate for change. Spargo-Ryan writes compellingly about her experiences of psychosis. In particular, she evokes her childhood experience of mental illness, a less often explored but critical issue. Her accounts of parenting (and reflections on being parented) capture generational shifts in approaches to, and understanding of, mental illness that are deeply affecting and important.
The memoir also digs deep into the intergenerational legacy of mental illness, expanding on themes Spargo-Ryan explored in The Suicide Gene. In that essay, she reflects on the trope of “family history” in relation to mental illness. In discovering her grandfather’s story, she finds uncanny kinship:
It was as though I’d found the missing link that would explain my own self. I found comfort in the idea of a ‘suicide gene’.
In A Kind of Magic, she finds the space to consider an alternative to living with chronic illness and the permission to choose survival.
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Hope and advocacy
“Family history”, of course, is also a diagnostic tool. Surfacing periodically throughout A Kind of Magic are diary entries, mapping the course of writing the book, and which was completed while living through the pandemic. Almost all of these entries narrate a therapeutic encounter – a record of living with mental illness over time.
There is a lot of waiting. There is the pain of failing to disclose adequately – “years of creating language that failed to communicate how sick I was” – and the pain of disclosing too well. Later in the memoir, Spargo-Ryan is asked whether she is a nurse. “I need to know a lot about it,” she explains, “so I can advocate for myself.”
Advocacy and trauma are linked in A Kind of Magic, as they are for so many who take up the challenging work of representing communities through personal narratives. Spargo-Ryan reflects that while writing this account has been very hard, she has found agency and control through the process, maybe a kind of healing.
Importantly, Spargo-Ryan is clear she has developed strong coping skills and maintains a strong network of personal and professional supporters, something other writers in this genre have noted is essential, but which also requires more than individual will to sustain.
A Kind of Magic is ultimately a hopeful book. Spargo-Ryan’s personal story is undeniably dark; her memoir is an ongoing survivor’s story. It is also very, very funny, and touching, and deeply empathetic. As per her chronically online persona, Spargo-Ryan is a dab hand at the one-liner. She is a wry and engaging observer of popular culture and a wonderful raconteur, unafraid to judge her own foibles and failings.
Along with individual day-to-day challenges, living with mental illness incurs severe stigma. Spargo-Ryan, despite her complex conditions, is luckier than many, and she knows it. She has a family history of mental illness, but she also has a safe middle-class life. “Circumstances conspired to keep me well,” she explains, “and the illness pushed through anyway.”
There are, of course, other more vulnerable people for whom circumstances are far less kind. A Kind of Magic does its work of asking a certain kind of reader to think about their own privilege and exercise a little more compassion and care, not just for their own hurt self (something Spargo-Ryan advocates), but for those who continue to suffer in circumstances far less conducive to surviving against the already stacked odds.
Authors: Kylie Cardell, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Flinders University 
