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D/R: Please share a bit of background as to how this collection came to be.
MB: I was interested in the way that psychosis affects women, and how it traditionally has been tied to biology, in particular the female reproductive body, for example with postpartum psychosis. There's also the fact that psychosis is more prevalent in women after the age of 45, which is often attributed to menopause. I was struck by the over-emphasis of biomedical discourse regarding women's “madness” and was wondering what else could be happening? Is this narrative another iteration of the unstable body or “unruly” hormonal story? I was also really inspired by dialogic practice, and the idea that some semblance of “truth” can be found in between people. So, I was thinking that what would make an interesting collection would be one where everyone's voice is honored, across a multitude of disciplines, in keeping with the idea of polyphony. I knew of Marilyn's work, of course, and also knew that she was interested in feminism and with understanding femininity and psychosis from a psychoanalytic perspective. I approached her, and luckily, she said yes and was interested in working on this together.
MC: I think the perspective that I'm bringing as someone a few decades older is a sense of what it has meant to be a woman and to not necessarily be seen as legitimate in one's own life as a speaking subject. I was a young adult in an era where a husband could speak for a wife, and one could not necessarily speak for oneself, where a woman could very easily be labeled as mentally ill and lose one's rights. I'm also someone who is very interested in literature as a chronicling of human experience. Those were the two contexts I was bringing, both historical and cultural. How do we make sense of what women have been trying to say for themselves, and what has been said about women? There is Freud's enigma: how do you know a woman? The man can know her from the outside, but not the inside. How do we speak