Sabrina Chapadjiev’s anthology, Live Through This: On Creativity and Self Destruction, strikes me in all ways as a carefully crafted object—which so few books are these days.

It is small and pleasing, covered in gorgeous art, and filled with important, diverse, beautiful, heartbreaking, original essays/poems /comics/drawings by some of the most fascinating writers I know of: Eileen Myles, Patricia Smith, Kate Bornstein, Toni Blackman, bell hooks etc. But even more, the message about women and madness—something that has been mined to death in some ways—is carefully crafted.

In the preface, Chapadjiev writes: “The glamorization of this issue, combined with the fear and shame built around it, has made understanding self-destructive behaviors almost impossible.� And this is what I’m grateful—immediately—that she understands. As the curator of a book like this, you are charged with the seemingly impossible task of talking about women’s creative impulses, as coupled with their self-destructive ones, without making the pairing look pretty. Or so ugly its romantic. It just is, or as she puts it:

We’ve been taught that self-destruction is an awful thing. “It is bad,� we’ve been told my therapists, psychologists, and those who do not understand its seduction. I would like to edit that. Instead of “It is bad,� I would like for it to read, “It is.�

It is. (And it reminds me of the Mad Pride Movement that Vanessa posted about earlier this week).

As someone who has read and written frequently on the topic (my masters thesis was on women and madness, my paternal grandmother was talented and thwarted by her own mental illness, Perfect Girls is obviously about, in part, self-destruction), I was so moved by the way that the authors within this anthology look at “rage to page� (as Chapadjiev calls it) with an observational tone, a sort of “this is what I’ve experienced and this is what I’ve learned and I hope it’s relatable and I’m not saying it’s romantic or necessary for artists.� And as someone who airs on the side of being too in control all the time, I agree with Chapadjiev and some of her authors, that a little self-destruction can go a long way.

Ultimately, of course, it is about control and power. Our hunger for it, our misuse of it, our experimentation with it, or as the amazing Nicole Blackman (I basically want her poem “Daughter� tattooed on my back) put it: “…self-destruction is the result of women not knowing how to reign in their power.�

And then the question becomes: reign or ride? The anthology offers lots of intriguing answers.

Next week: I’ll be on vacation but we got a great guest review on Salvage by Jane Kotapish coming your way. After that I’m talking about Sloane Crosley’s I Was Told There'd Be Cake.