A beach read about mental health
She wanted a happy tale about living with mental illness, so she wrote one
Leanne Toshiko Simpson has finally come to the end of a 10-year journey and is now starting a new one where she hopes to spark “joy and community and love.”
It’s been 10 years since the University of Toronto professor was in a Scarborough hospital’s psychiatric ward for bipolar disorder. It’s been 10 years since she asked her doctor if there were any happy books about people living with mental illness. And it’s been 10 years since she realized “Silver Linings Playbook” was the only one.
Now, Toshiko Simpson is adding to this canon with the release of “Never Been Better,” which she calls the mental health rom-com she’d always dreamed of.
This debut novel is about three friends who meet in a Scarborough psych ward while undergoing treatment for their bipolar diagnoses: Dee, Matt and Misa. A year after their discharges, Matt and Misa announce they’re getting married. The only problem? Dee is in love with Matt and he has no idea. But she’s going to their destination wedding in Turks and Caicos anyway — and plans to confess her true feelings there.
Toshiko Simpson’s personal experience informs the book, but it isn’t autofiction. She’s never been part of a love triangle while in hospital. But her own existential questions do come up.
“This book helped me write through a lot of the things that I was holding on to,” she said. “Could I forgive myself for the person I was 10 years ago? Did I deserve love? Did I deserve happiness after living the kind of life that I had?”
Toshiko Simpson wrote the book when experiencing the manic and depressive cycles that accompany bipolar disorder.
She wrote certain pages of the book while in mania. You can feel her “pulsing energy” when you read about Dee’s innermost feelings about picture-perfect Misa: “I didn’t hope she was sick or anything, but part of me hoped that if she was, she was quite unattractively sick.”
Later in the book, Toshiko Simpson was writing in a depressed state. You can feel the tug of despair as Dee flashes back to the first time she saw Matt and Misa’s engagement announcement on Instagram: “They had all the promise of a brilliant future when I could barely imagine tomorrow.”
“I wanted the rhythm of the book to be a bit like rumination,” Toshiko Simpson said. “You get sucked backwards in time into a memory
that you wish you could forget, or something that isn’t there for you any longer that you wish you could have back.”
She purposefully didn’t set the book in a hospital or a psych ward, choosing instead a beach in Turks and Caicos because it’s exactly the opposite of that. She wanted to avoid triggering anyone into bad memories of their own experience. Instead, Toshiko Simpson describes it as a “mental-health beach read.”
It has all the themes of the genre — sandy beaches, unlimited drinks, a love triangle — but with a twist: the book focuses just as much on Dee’s love for Matt as it does on her community, including her sister and her friends.
“A lot of people want to read to escape, not be reminded (of mental illness),” Toshiko Simpson said. “You can get so much joy and community and love out of a mentalhealth book.”
She writes with humour, even when dealing with sensitive subjects. For instance, Dee’s sister cracks a self-harm joke when she asks the protagonist to promise her she’s not in the washroom doing anything “suicide-y.”
“Some people, who maybe don’t have the kind of familiarity with mental illness, think you can’t just make a joke about suicide,” Toshiko Simpson said. “I’m like, ‘Well, you can if you’ve had this many attempts.’ ”
When she’s not writing, Toshiko Simpson teaches creative writing and disability fiction at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus. She tries to teach people about mental illness without lecturing (“I hate being lectured”). And she especially wants to bring this learning to her own JapaneseCanadian community.
She leads mental-health writing circles for Japanese Canadians and has seen how hard it is for many people to openly speak about mental illness. She says this is especially true when they compare their mental-health struggles to many of their families’ traumatic internment histories.
Toshiko Simpson focuses on this struggle in “Never Been Better” through Misa, who is Japanese.
Misa feels the pressure to uphold herself as a “model minority” by never telling anyone — except her Obachan, her grandmother — about her time in the psych ward. Her perfect destination wedding continues to hold up that narrative for her.
“I was interested in the ways that Misa really wanted to win at being mentally ill,” Toshiko Simpson said.
The author hopes her book can open this conversation for her own community.
“There’s more roundabout pathways to enter that conversation that aren’t from the clinical lens. I hope that ‘Never Been Better’ will be one of them.”
Toshiko Simpson wrote the book while experiencing the manic and depressive cycles that accompany bipolar disorder