Kerry Neville
Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir
October 8, 2026
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How Do You Write a Memoir When You Can’t Remember: Memory, reconstruction, and “recovering.” Writing the truth of a life from fragments, and why recovery is a verb, not an ending.
How do you write a memoir when you can’t remember? For me that question was literal: twenty-five rounds of electric shock erased years of my linear memory and left me with splinters. So I went digging through hospital records, therapists’ notes, disability paperwork, old photos and emails, the journals I kept even at my worst, and the friends who remembered what I couldn’t. (A warning: don’t read your own doctors’ notes unless you have a writer’s distance.) None of those sources could be fully trusted (including me). The doctors wrote with confident authority even though they only ever saw me for fifteen minutes at a time, and even my journals were written after the fact. I tried over and over to write it straight, this happened and then this happened, and every draft was mouth-to-mouth on a corpse.
So I ditched linear time and built the book the way memory builds itself, out of fragments, journal entries, poems, lists, and rabbit holes into neuroscience and Antarctic expeditions and the etymology of words. If you could see the corkboard behind my computer, you’d understand: notes pinned on notes pinned on notes, in the only order I’ve given them today. Tomorrow? I’ll probably move them around. You don’t need ECT to be an unreliable narrator, by the way, because we all rearrange our pasts every day, deciding which memories get to matter. I checked the facts that could be checked, but I was really after emotional truth. Then I revised, and revised again. I’ll never be able to write “the one-and-true” story of those years, but I wrote a true story, the truest one I could tell right now.
What the book is about: A memoir about motherhood, madness, and the grace of second and third chances. When my children were young and my marriage was failing, I was caught in the perfect storm of bipolar disorder, anorexia, and alcoholism. Hospitalizations, 25 electroconvulsive shock treatments, and even an exorcism were desperate lifelines that failed. The book follows how I found my way back to joy and hope anyway.
The title comes from a blog I kept during my darkest years. Readers wrote to tell me I wasn’t the only momma going through the really hard stuff. I kept coming back to the title for the sound of the M’s and for the uncertainty in it: not “maybe,” but “may be,” or may not be.
- Why I wrote it: Catharsis wasn’t the reason. When you’re deep in mental illness, you can’t see that there’s any possibility on the other side of the wall. I wanted to show that there is.
- What I learned: Memoir is excavation. Even when you’re writing about yourself, you have to do real research. We are all unreliable narrators. Early drafts should be ferocious and feral, and revision should be meticulous and exacting.
- How I found my publisher: My agent sent the manuscript to the big presses. The feedback was positive, but the answer was no, no, no. I knew the nonlinear structure would be a hard sell. My agent kept going. Then Kim Davis and the editorial team at Madville Publishing said a quick, enthusiastic yes: the right home, the right editor, the right time. The book came out in October 2025 and went on to win Georgia Author of the Year in Memoir.
Kerry Neville is the author of the memoir Momma May Be Mad, winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Memoir in 2026, praised in a starred Kirkus review, and featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and RTÉ’s Sunday Miscellany, and two collections of stories, Necessary Lies and Remember to Forget Me. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Brevity, The Washington Post, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. Her fiction and nonfiction have been named Notables in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. She was a Fulbright Fellow at University of Limerick in Ireland, where she was visiting faculty in the M.A. Creative Writing Program. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, and teaches at Georgia College and State University.
Instagram: @Kerrybneville @Kerrynevilleirelandfulbright
Facebook: Kerry Beth Neville
