It’s very disturbing. Sure, the character is experiencing mental health issues and it's not something light to discuss, it was brave for the author to tell Juliet’s story, how she was able to write what was happening to the character’s mind, and I don’t expect perfection or a good plot because the mind or POV of the character itself is a huge web string of emotions.

I was a bit conflicted about this book, I actually started reading it expecting a fiction, which was soon clear to me it wasn't.
I was a bit confused for the first part of the book, the reader is introduced to a lot of characters, a lot of names and a lot of events, Short chapters with a lot of unrelated things going on. But as I came farther in the book I started to understand.
It is a powerful book, about a very troubled young girl and her horrible journey through drugs and mental illnesses. Around halfway through the book it started to become very interesting and I found myself needing to know what happened to Juliet.

I loved the pace and the writing of this book, but I wish the ending had been fleshed out more. It felt unfinished.

Juliet is a pretty, average, pretty average upper-middle class girl coming of age in Southern California. By all accounts, Juliet's life should become a charmed one. Her grades are good, she had a best friend, she's pretty, blonde and likable. This all changes when Juliet's brain betrays her and she starts to lose the ability to sleep. She also starts to see and hear things, have religious grandiosity and cannot concentrate. She was a cutter, but her self-injurious behavior turns suicidal when the pain won't go away with her cutting.

What follows is her next few years, from hospitals to a residential treatment facility, to a glimpse of her adulthood.

It is well-written and a change from the usual coming of age novels. I was impressed.

One of those books you just will not put down until it's done! Love the POV, the location, the time period. Can't wait till it's in print so I can start recommending it to patrons and friends. Reminiscent of "Girl Interrupted". The writing is so polished. Anyone that ever was a teenage girl, has a teenage girl or is a teenage girl will identify with so much of this story.

Thank you Juliet.
Thank you for providing such a detailed and realistic insights into the onset and struggles of mental illnesses. There are a lot of misconceptions about mental illnesses especially when it comes to depression and self-harm. This book allows us to get a glimpse of the inner turmoil of a person who suffers from manic depression and hopefully in turn, more understanding and compassion for people who are struggling with this everyday.

I wanted to love this but didn't. The writing was quite good when it came to describing events and places but the characters were so flat and dull. They had no personality and I didn't care about any of them. This is a shame because I believe it is supposed to be an autobiographic novel and the author really should have been able to flesh out characters based on her own life.

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"It is hard to tease out the beginning. When I was living it, my disintegration seemed sudden, like I had once been whole but then my reality swiftly slipped apart into sand. Not even sand, but slime, something desperate and oozing and sick. But looking back - I was a slow burn that eventually imploded."

Juliet Escoria has moments of literary brilliance, I mean just read that opening quote.

This book, however, fell really flat for me.

It's a fiction book that reads like an autobiography, complete with the main character having the same first and last name of the author. I can only assume this story is rooted in fact.

I'm not a fan of memoirs. I'm not a fan of straightforward first person stories being told in a chronological order.

Juliet IS this story.
The entire book rests on Juliet's character. And as a character she is
monotone, unremarkable and easily forgettable. She's written in a manner that left me emotionless where I should have felt anything but.

There are a lot of great books out there that deal with mental illness in teenagers in a raw and unflinching way, this book, however, is not one of them.

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I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Heart wrenching raw real look at teenage mental illness.This is reads like a memoir at times difficult to deal with all the sadness .An emotional read that will stay with you. #netgalley #melvillehouse

This was interesting and at times tough to read being in the headspace of a teenager with serious mental health issues. As a teenager I dealt with some similar things and the headspace and the suffocating feeling of it felt really familiar ... almost uncomfortably so.

I found the pace to be distracting and uneven. Perhaps my fault, but I didn't even realize it was a memoir until part way through. For how brutal the subject matter was, the ending felt super rushed. I felt like I wasn't rewarded for getting through the book with more of how she overcame her circumstances and for some reason that made me feel a little icky - like I'd somehow exploited this awful situation as a reader.

I also felt that the secondary characters fell a little flat. I would have liked to know more about her family situation and the other kids. I get that this might have been intentional given how locked in her own mind she felt and that this is a memor, but I still didn't feel like I got to know them.

It feels weird to not really have liked a book where someone quite clearly bares their soul but I just needed more of a resolution.

Also to note: the notebook pages were absolutely impossible to read on my kindle, I wonder if they could be annotated in an appendix?

I also posted this on goodreads and my instagram story.

Alt lit is dead.

That was the consensus in some corners of the internet a few years ago, when a series of sexual misconduct allegations led to the exile of multiple prominent male figures of the online literary movement. Whatever alt lit would look like in the future, it wouldn’t be the same…fortunately.

As a style that peaked in the first years of this decade, alt lit was distinguished by prose and poetry that was linear and plainly written, given dimension by the constantly-shifting contours of its native online platforms. Typically focusing on the everyday dramas (or lack thereof) of its young writers, their dry affects working alternately to comic and tragic effect, alt lit captured both the ennui of a constantly networked 21st century existence and the liberation of posting your drafts.

Juliet Escoria was a familiar name in alt lit circles. Among other writers who published in anthologies such as 40 Likely to Die Before 40, the West-Virginia-via-California-via-Australia author found kindred spirits among those whose multimedia work — moving back and forth across the line between fictional and autobiographical — didn’t comfortably fit into the standard models of literary expression.

Her latest, Juliet the Maniac, fits comfortably between two covers and functions as the novel it comes billed as, but it bears clear hallmarks of what used to be called alt lit. It unfolds in a series of short vignettes about a teenage girl whose life shares key biographical details with the author’s — including her name, Juliet Escoria. Interspersed “notes from the future” refer to this Juliet as the “fictionalized version of myself.”

A more conventional narrative might frame this as the story of someone who lost and then found herself again, but Escoria isn’t after anything so tidy. We gather there’s a reason the book begins where it does (with a 14-year-old Juliet becoming aware of a “foreign thing” growing inside her mind) and ends where it does (a 16-year-old Juliet writes a letter urging her future self to stay sober and happy), but neither the author or any of her characters tell us exactly what it all means. The implication, of course, is that she’s still figuring that out.

As befits a genre tailored for the internet, alt lit was built not on analysis but on simple attention. You learn about a person by discovering what they pay attention to…and what they do when they notice it, but even that may be relatively unimportant, especially in the case of a character like Juliet the Maniac.

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Juliet struggles to stabilize her sense of self. Drugs can help, but they can also kill. Self-harm becomes a way to cope, and Juliet lands in deeply flawed institutions where she’s subjected to seemingly absurd regimens of therapy and medication. Finally, a pastoral program seems to give her some breathing room…until the maniac returns.

You won’t soon forget scenes like Juliet and her friend doping up at residential construction sites, lounging in the unfinished houses and making bad decisions. The institutional scenes have a Cuckoo’s Nest flavor, but in place of electroshock therapy there’s a bizarrely misguided “treatment” involving an adult who comes in and studies the teen patients for the purpose of insulting them back to health.

Throughout, Juliet struggles to put her mental state into words. “The molecules around my head buzzed” as she’s surrounded by birds and freaks out. “The diseased feeling was erupting again, spilling filthy out of my chest” as she falls apart near the end of her freshman year. She has an “odd palpitation of power” when she and another girl astonish a peer by illicitly rubbing his crotch.

The cumulative effect is kaleidoscopic, a tumble through this troubled teenage life. You may recognize yourself, or you may feel a newfound empathy for kids like Juliet who spend adolescence steeped in a chemical stew as they try to figure out who (and why) they are.

In retrospect, it’s sadly unsurprising that alt lit — a literary scene that often amplified girls’ voices — also saw some vulnerable young women exploited by male gatekeepers. Breaking the rules of writing proved easier than breaking the grip of patriarchy.

A few years on, though, it’s women’s voices from that scene that continue to shine. Megan Boyle has a big new book. There are must-see poetry readings by women who rose to fame in the alt lit era. Writers like Melissa Broder are finding literary fame with elements of the alt lit style. There will be more, and more, and more.

If Juliet the Maniac is what the future looks like, long live alt lit.

I found a lot of repetition throughout the book, but was interesting to see the insider's view of these types of inpatient programs.. I really felt for author and found her story to really shed light on rehabs that are not what they would seem. Thanks for the ARC, Net Galley

I wanted to love this based on Emily Gould's praise but I just... mleh. As a novel that's very close to being a memoir, I'm rating it higher than I would otherwise because I feel bad about calling someone's real life experiences generic and played out in YA fic.

Brutal. This book reads far more like fiction than it does a memoir, and I mean that in the best way possible since I tore through it, completely unable to put it down. I haven't come across a book that describes what it's like having bipolar disorder as well as this one does, and there were so many moments where I couldn't breathe because a particular example or story of Juliet's sounded so much like one of my own personal experiences before I was on some damn good medication. Juliet's wild emotions and thought processes as she progresses from newly diagnosed troubled teen to the very end where she goes on kind of like a vision quest with the rest of her RTS classmates are clear, brutal, and raw. Escoria's candid writing style is effective, and sometimes it's reminiscent of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar without being an outright copy or even an attempted copy of Plath's writing.

All of this being said, I can understand how this book would be triggering for anyone struggling with mental illness of any kind. Even though Juliet gets to a place of healing at the end of the book, her whole journey could possibly trigger someone, so if that's something you're concerned about as a reader who might be personally affected...then there's your warning.

What a painfully powerful book. I only hope to see more of Escoria's writing, and I especially hope to see a follow up to Juliet the Maniac that shows us what happened next. Highly recommend.

Edit, 1/18/2019: I went back and looked and saw that this is a NOVEL, which makes sense since I said in the beginning that it reads like a novel. It's an autobiographical novel but officially labelled as a novel, so there you go.

I received an advanced reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review

A very accurate insight into the onset of mental illness for adolescents. She is not quite relatable but hold our compassion even when we are frustrated with her illness.

Wow so many feelings for this book. I don't even really know where to start...

I'll start with part of the book's description that totally made me mad: "An explosive portrayal of teenage life from the perspective of The Bad Friend..." what?! This is a terrible description for the book I read. There are few things that make me angrier than reading blurb copy that was written to raise curiosity/to sensationalize and then book ends up being something completely different and now you're disappointed not because the book was bad but because the blurb set the wrong expectation.

The first sentence of the blurb here in goodreads is closer to the truth of this book: "It's 1997, and 14-year-old Juliet has it pretty good. But over the course of the next two years, she rapidly begins to unravel, finding herself in a downward trajectory of mental illness and self-destruction." but really if I were explaining it to a friend, I'd say this is a book about a 14-year-old who is suffering from several forms of mental illness, most specifically being bipolar. It's the story of her trying to (or her parents forcing) to find her way back. It's raw and honest and disturbing in all the ways life can be when you're suffering from mental illness and are also a teenager.

She is not a "bad friend," she's just a girl who's struggling so very deeply and keeps making choices that don't serve her because she's sick, because she's struggling, because she's lonely, because she feels "not right" inside, because...well for all the reasons many of us struggle during some of the most formative years of our lives.

I can't relate to any of what Juliet does in this novel (side note: or is it non-fiction? I could never be sure and still am really not. If it's meant to be a novel it would have been better served by the main character having a different name. in my opinion this only serves to confuse the reader and doesn't add to the story.) I didn't take any drugs or really much alcohol during my teen years. I don't want to give away much of what happens in the story (even though I think the things she "does" isn't really what the story is about.) But I could relate to her anyway. I could relate to her suffering. I could emphasize with her. The writing was so real that I could almost feel it crawling under my skin.

What was most interesting to me is that I alternated between reading the book as my teen-self and as my parent-of-teen self. I don't even have a daughter but there were parts of the book where I got so mad at her for continuing to self-sabotage and make choices that wouldn't stop hurting her. I felt angry and frustrated and wanted to stop reading. And then there were other parts that brought me right back to my own old teenage self where I could connect with her feelings of emptiness and pain.

Clearly, this book left an impression on me. I will say that I didn't want to be reading it as I was reading it. It was painful and raw. I didn't want to watch her as she was doing so much harm to herself and others. But yet, I am glad I read it. And I will likely think about it for a long while.

Juliet is a story about a young woman's struggle with mental illness. Thought it is a novel, it reads more like a memoir. Juliet's experience is both astoundingly optimistic and ruthlessly dreadful. The highs and lows of Juliet's tumultuous adolescence are told in such a way that you feel each of them intimately and deeply, as if they were your own highs and lows. The author has done a great job capturing what it means to vacillate between feeling confused and confident, isolated and so impossibly connected to another person that you ache for them. Never have I read a book that reminded me so strongly of what it was like to be a teen—to feel everything and to feel nothing at all so intensely that your body itself seemed incapable of surviving so many emotions.

This was a raw and unapologetic look into mental illness. While it always far from a “fun” read, it was fantastic and important. The story was uncomfortable and hard to continue at times, but that is part of what made it truly successful.

Heartbreaking story of a young girls journey through mental illness. Content is eye opening and hard to get through, but ultimately uplifting. Thank goodness the medical community takes mental illness more seriously now than it did in the 80’s and 90’s, and now there are more resources for help. Bravo to Ms. Escoria for bravely telling your story and hopefully helping many others, you are truly an inspiration.

“Not once did anyone ever talk about what it was like when the trauma was yourself.”

This stark, unsentimental novel puts readers inside the head of Juliet, a teenager in the late 1990s battling bipolar disorder, drug addiction, and suicidal ideation.

The first-person narrative is cleverly supplemented with reports from therapists and psychiatrists on Juliet’s diagnosis, behavior and condition to juxtapose her internal perspective with the external.

While it’s a raw and candid account of an adolescent in the throes of mental illness, there lacked a sense of freshness or novelty about this often written about subject. Most compelling to me was not the redundant progression of Juliet’s life (get high, self-harm, repeat), but the more introspective insights on the horrors of mental illness: that claustrophobia of being unable to escape your own mind.

I wouldn’t consider this Young Adult fiction, however I can see it appealing to teenage readers probably more than adults.

*Thanks to NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review*