A Review of Kerry Neville's Momma May be Mad
- nervetowrite
- Jul 14
- 3 min read
How do you write a memoir when the memories themselves are missing? This is the central question of Kerry Neville’s Momma May Be Mad, a fragmented and deeply intimate account of memory loss, motherhood, and mental illness. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Neville writes openly about her experiences with alcoholism, anorexia, self-harm, and the severe depression that eventually led to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Neville loses large portions of her past, leaving her with only scattered fragments. These come in many different forms like photographs, journal entries, research notes, and partial recollections.
Early in the memoir, she asks, “How can I write a memoir when I can’t remember?” Rather than reconstructing her life into a linear narrative, Neville embraces this rupture, allowing the form of the memoir itself to mirror the instability of memory. The book resists chronology, moving instead through disjointed moments that feel both immediate and unreachable. Neville revisits memories that surface without warning, only to dissolve again, creating a reading experience that reflects the disorientation of her condition. At one point, she writes that “years and years of my life… are inaccessible,” stored somewhere in her mind but locked away.
This absence is not just personal but relational. In a devastating moment, her daughter asks why her father needs to protect her, and Neville responds: “My brain sickness.” The simplicity of this exchange reveals the emotional weight of her illness, particularly within the context of motherhood, where memory becomes tied to responsibility, identity, and care.
What makes Momma May Be Mad especially compelling is how it uses fragmentation not as a limitation, but as a deliberate narrative strategy. The inclusion of photographs, journal fragments, and research materials within the text blurs the boundary between lived experience and reconstruction. These elements do not simply document memory as they attempt to replace it, raising questions about what it means to “know” one’s own life. Neville’s writing embraces uncertainty, suggesting that clarity is not always possible, and that meaning can still emerge from disorientation. In this way, the memoir reflects the experience of madness itself, where time collapses and identity becomes unstable. Neville describes herself as simultaneously “forty-nine… and also nine… and also thirty-nine,” capturing a self that exists across multiple, conflicting temporalities.
In giving language to a mother’s mental illness without softening it, Neville pushes against the expectation that women must remain stable, selfless, and whole at all times, making this memoir an important contribution to ongoing conversations about how women live with, hide, and endure mental illness. Momma May Be Mad is a beautifully raw memoir about the act of writing as a form of survival. Faced with gaps she cannot fill, Neville constructs a narrative out of what remains, allowing absence to coexist with presence. The result is a work that challenges traditional expectations of memoir, reminding readers that memory is not fixed or reliable, but fragile and constantly shifting. In this instability, Neville finds a different kind of truth, one that is incomplete, but deeply human.
Raquel Desiree DeGrasse is a writer and graduate student from Massachusetts pursuing her MA in English at Bridgewater State University. She writes about memory, family, and the way people carry their past with them. She’s drawn to stories that feel honest and emotionally vulnerable, and that find meaning in ordinary moments. When she’s not reading or writing, she enjoys baking and cake decorating, the first long warm spring day, and debriefing about life with her fiancé.