Her family never talked about it. But when Margaret Kimball ’06 (SFA) was four, her mother attempted suicide on Mother’s Day while the rest of the family was at church. They were still not talking when, during Kimball’s senior year of high school, her mother’s bipolar disorder kept her in the hospital for a couple weeks.
Kimball is talking — and drawing — now in “And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir,” which has the literary world talking, too. Publishers Weekly calls the book “riveting,” Library Journal says “thoroughly brilliant,” and Kirkus is “eager for a successor.”
To create the graphic memoir, Kimball had to investigate her own childhood as if it belonged to someone else. She interviewed her family and combed through photos, albums, and old diaries to understand and relay the nuances of living in a home where the specter of mental illness hovers over everything.
