Book Proposal Prep Notes
Title: Diary of A Bag Lady
By Diana Grippo
1) The Point: Mental illness is a spiritual emergency and should not be pathologized. Though medication is sometimes necessary, the current treatment is not healing. I illustrate a different way of looking at mental illness through an autobiographical format. The cycles of mania and depression I’ve experienced are quite dramatic and include psychosis, a term people throw around without really thinking about the definition: loss of touch with reality.
Much of the book is humorous in tone, because laughter is healing and it’s what’s pulled me through. There really are some very funny things that can happen when you’re delusional. There are terrifying things that can happen as well.
My purpose is to open people’s minds. I’m very concerned with adolescents in whom the onset of these spiritual crises are so often misunderstood and therefore minimized. Adolescence is when my emergence started. What used to be a mid-life crisis - where one questions one’s purpose in life - has moved to an adolescent crisis. We are evolving as a species, so this makes perfect sense. The questions asked by adolescents are no less compelling.
2) The Market: Adults and adolescents are my market. I name each chapter after a song and include the lyrics at the end of the chapter. In the lyrics of each song, the writers either question his or her sanity, or he or she provides answers as to what has brought meaning into his or her life. There are of course countless musicians whose sanity has been questioned, and substance abuse has often masked the root of the problem – a spiritual crisis.
I of course have impeccable taste in music so everyone will want this book. (That statement is of course just one of the vestiges of my good old delusions of grandeur. How I miss them...) Really though: When I was teaching, I remember sharing “our music” with my students, and they loved it. I had so many creative juices flowing when I was manic that there’s a whole soundtrack to this book, and though it’s never been done, I’m going to accompany the book with a CD and people will buy the book just to get this superb and eclectic mix. Also, music is the language of the soul, and there’s no way I can explain how healing music has been for me, as it was often the only power that could quiet the voices.
3) My Promise: This book will have a positive impact in that it will bring compassion and empathy to the mentally ill and homeless. I know this because I’ve been using my writing that way from the beginning. Friends who know my story ask for my help in dealing with people with mental illness and their families. It helps. It helps to read about something that has such a stigma when there’s humor and hope involved. And that’s my story: My home was a shopping cart in the Tenderloin of San Francisco and Glide Memorial fed me. Now I’m in P.R. at a high tech firm and I have a very full and fun life. The expectations for the mentally ill are excruciatingly low. I want to change that.
