Cartoonist Ellen Forney’s 2012 memoir Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me began with her diagnosis as bipolar, sought to understand the archetype of the “crazy” artist, and followed her struggle to find mental and emotional balance. Washington Post, Time, Entertainment Weekly and Publishers Weekly were among the many publications to rank it among that year’s finest graphic novels.

Having lived stable since 2002, Forney was in a good place to look back, dig into her experiences, and share them in the pages of Marbles. But getting stable is only part of the story. These days, Forney continues to ride the seesaw of her emotions and that daily struggle served as the genesis for her new companion book from Fantagraphics, Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life, a manual of tips and counsel for living with mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder.

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“[Rock Steady] was definitely a very different challenge,” Forney explained in an interview with CBR. “It certainly wasn’t as personally and emotionally wrenching. Marbles took a lot of difficult and painful self-examination, getting that down on paper and sharing it. Rock Steady was coming from a much more grounded place. It was a lot of gathering and a lot of work, but it definitely did feel more stable.

“We stopped calling it a sequel [to Marbles]. I consider it a companion book. That story arc from being really in the thick of mood swings and getting my diagnosis, the real struggle to get stable as much as one can be without a cure -- it’s a tidy story arc in a way,” she said. “But getting stability isn’t maintaining stability, and that’s where I’m at now. It’s been years and years, and it’s not as dramatic, so what is the story now? And what it is is a lot tools and a lot of examining. In Rock Steady, I did a lot more specifically getting into analyzing all the different aspects of how to be stable.”

The experience of putting all she’d learned about living with bipolar disorder down on paper surprised Forney. “Oh my god, I learned so much when I did this.” She even noted that she discovered “new tools for me in the course of doing the book. In that way, after Marbles, the story really is ‘How do you maintain?’ In that way, it’s a continuation. Marbles was my personal story with some tools folded in, and basically Rock Steady is the flip of that. It’s tools with some of my personal stories told.”

Ironically, the existence of Rock Steady will be providing new challenges to Forney’s 16 years of stability, as she’ll be touring in support of the new book. Fortunately, everywhere she travels, she’ll have copies of her own guidebook to refer to.

“[The stress of a book tour is] definitely [something] I had to consider,” she admitted. “One of my main points in Rock Steady relates to the title itself. That’s basically what life is, and how it is we have to think about dealing with stability. We’re going to get thrown off whatever we might consider our optimal way of staying healthy and stable, and then it’s a matter of figuring out how to steady ourselves. Like in chapter one, you’re standing in the middle of a seesaw and maybe for the most part you have enough tools to stay pretty balanced in the middle, but sometimes it’s gonna tip a bit and you just kind of figure out how to stay on the seesaw. For me, what that means is I’m gonna be dealing with jet lag; I’m gonna be dealing with a certain amount of stress; and I’m gonna be meeting a lot of people I haven’t met before.

“I’ve done a couple book tours before, so I kind of have an idea of the kinds of challenges that I’m going to encounter. I’m just going to make sure to stay focused on the parts of the seesaw that I need to pay attention to: getting enough sleep and as regularly as I can; not forgetting my meds even though I’m off my routine; eating well and on a regular basis. If I’m stressing out, what are the tools -- I have a whole chapter on tools -- to calm yourself when overwhelmed, knowing that I might need to take a step back and do some sort of breathing exercise.

“It’s knowing that my routine is going to be thrown off a bit. So here again, that gets into chapter six, Danger Zones, with red flagpoles and red flags,” Forney explained, going back to the touchstone of Rock Steady. “The red flagpole would be all sorts of things that have to do with a book tour and all the stresses I was just talking about, and just doing what I can to look out for the red flags to make sure those aren’t coming up, and dealing with those.”

Turning the discussion to what readers can find in the pages of Rock Steady, Forney told CBR that the book mixes a combination of approaches, including “informal things that I have come up with myself, like ways to mark your generic medications. Then there are a lot of studies -- I’m the kind of nerd that loves doing research. Then there were a couple of psychiatrists -- one in particular -- that I asked to work with me as a consultant. She’s a clinical psychiatrist, so she has the point of view of what a psychiatrist, a clinician, a caregiver would recommend. She’s pretty progressive, so our attitudes about the kind of treatment that is realistic and helpful really lined up, and that was important to me. She also had an overview of a lot of different people she deals with -- other people with bipolar in particular.

“So I was kind of working with a wide range of sources,” Forney said. “It is really important to me to get it accurate. It’s not going to be useful if it’s not. It’s why I have a whole bibliography, to make sure people know that they can trust the information. I did that really carefully -- the section on substances in particular. The doctor that I cite there, Tushar Kumar, is an addiction psychiatrist specifically. We went back and forth and back and forth, and we talked for a really long time on the phone. It’s such an important issue.

“I know that there are other reference books that are comics, but it’s not a format that the general public tends to see as a source of reliable scientific information. In particular, the medical and scientific community is slower to pick up on this kind of material as reliable or accurate or appropriate, so I wanted to make really sure that what I was offering is accurate. And part of what I went through with Dr. Ashely Bouzis was to make sure that the language I was using would be useful and recognizable to clinicians, that the language would make sense to them in their own practice.”

Striking a balance between the medical consensus for bipolarism and her own experience living with it proved challenging. “From the beginning, what I wanted to do with this book was to give my own tips, tricks, and tools that I had come up with myself. Because you can get the clinical information if you read articles and studies,” she explained. “[I like] research and gathering all this information, but at the same time, it was really important to make clear that [this advice] is coming from someone with bipolar disorder, someone who is using this stuff and who has a personal take on the relevance of this.”

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As part of keeping that balance, Forney needed to show readers that even the someone who appears to have it together still makes mistakes along the road of daily maintenance. “It was important for me to put in some of the times that I messed up,” Forney said. “It’s like there’s Rocking and there’s Steady, and sometimes the rocking is from our own ‘oops.’ There’s that story where I took vitamin D instead of my mood stabilizers for three days, right? So I wanted to make it clear that you can know all this stuff backwards and forwards, and yet you’re not going to be able to have your optimal treatment all the time. And you’re not then falling down a hole. I was embarrassed, [but] I called my doctor and figured out what the plan is going to be and got back on and learned my lesson. So you’re going to mess up. That’s fine. Just figure out what to do and get back on the seesaw and steady yourself.”

After the turmoil of producing Marbles, Forney didn’t plan to revisit her bipolar life in book form again. Speaking of that time, she told CBR, “After Marbles -- you know, it just took so much -- I wasn’t going to do anything about bipolar disorder or mental illness. Maybe I wasn’t going to do anything autobiographical.

Ellen Forney (photo by Jacob Peter Fennell)

“Then enough time went by, and after talking with enough people and really feeling a sense of purpose and groundedness, I [knew] I have more to say,” Forney said. “But it took a good -- let’s say five years for me to look back and say, ‘Actually this is important to me. I have more to say.’ I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who told me they used Marbles like a manual. That made me think, I can do a better manual than Marbles. And I had a lot of material that didn’t make it into Marbles, things I would up talking about in the intervening years that I felt would make sense to disseminate more widely.”

At this point, the biggest issue is making sure the audience that can benefit from Rock Steady can find it. Fantagraphics has multiple distribution partners, and a plan in place to push the book out to readers seeking books on mental health.

Getting the book to the audience that needs it is “definitely a tricky one,” Forney said. “It’s not a graphic novel; it’s not a graphic memoir. It’s a guidebook. From my experience, having talked to so many people since Marbles, there are enough people who are dealing with mental illness to some degree -- in practically every group that you can think of - that I think it will reach a lot of people who will be receptive and who it might be helpful for.

“Fantagraphics are awesome. I’m so happy to be working with Fantagraphics,” she enthused. “They’re really interested in exploring new territory and maybe getting a new kind of readership. So we’re approaching more psychology-related, more health-related publications and people. There’s another health book that’s out right now -- I’m going to be talking with Kriota Willberg (author of Draw Stronger: Self Care for Cartoonists and Visual Artists) at The Strand. She has a book that’s basically a guide for healthy physical habits for artists. I’m curious to see where her book winds up, because I feel in a way like I’m a country punk klezmer band. You know, like where am I going to be shelved? Rock Steady would be strange next to Calvin and Hobbes and a series of manga. But it’s going to wind up there. Basically, I’m using a medium that I think is really powerful, in particular for mental health. I’m just gonna do what makes sense to me and send it out there with the support of Fantagraphics and see what happens.”

Forney also talked to CBR about Rock Steady’s benefits to readers outside of those living with bipolar disorder.

“A lot of it is really applicable to anyone. I mean, moods and emotions are universal experiences. I think there is a lot of anxiety in communities that I know of, so I think there are a lot of things like mindfulness and meditation -- ways to calm yourself -- that are really appropriate and helpful for anyone.

“Then, of course, there’s a lot of stuff that’s more specific to mental health, even more specific to mood disorders and bipolar disorder, that might allow some more understanding of the experience. For example, a clinician who is [asking], 'Why is my patient not taking their meds? They know that they need to be taking their meds.' One of the things I deal with in the chapter about meds is, it’s hard to! It’s hard to remember; it’s hard to keep track of everything; and it’s hard to deal with the fact that you might need them or to figure out if you do really need them.”

Even for those without any mental illness, Rock Steady “might allow you to better understand people who are dealing with this,” she explained. “I think mania in particular is difficult to understand -- understanding clinical depression is still complicated, because feeling down is definitely different from clinical depression -- but mania is a really very different kind of experience. If you’re manic, it’s really hard to keep yourself from going there, because it can be really tempting. I know from personal experience that it’s hard, but this is what it’s about. So that is specifically a message for people who get manic, but I think it’s a difficult experience for people to understand. I hope [it] would help people to understand how somebody who gets manic might have a hard time pulling themselves back.”

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Forney’s role in educating about mental health continues to evolve in new ways. “I curated an exhibit for the National Library of Medicine that was launched in January. It’s a traveling exhibit [with] a web component,” she shared. “I believe in graphic medicine, and graphic medicine in a term that a lot of people aren’t really familiar with. There’s a whole field. If you’ve never heard of it, I’d say look up graphicmedicine.org. This book is squarely a part of that field.”

Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life is available now from Fantagraphics Books.