Reviewed by Phil Smith
Content Warning: Racism, murder, state violence, ableism, saneism
Growing up, Dandelion was her nickname, one given by her father and an auntie;
when her siblings would tease her that those were the same weeds that their father routinely pulled out of the yard, he would quickly remind her that things could have a dual purpose. That they can be both a beautiful flower and a steadfast weed. She carried this truth with her through the years of her life (Bainbridge, 2025, p. 185).
Danielle Bainbridge turned the nickname into the title of a book, Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays, the subtitle describing aptly what the book is: a set of stories about her time (so far) on the planet. An assistant professor at Northwestern University, Bainbridge talks about growing up Black and Queer, an immigrant, and a woman diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She describes the meaning for her of the killing of a Black man, Jordyn Neely, by a white man, Daniel Penny, on a subway in New York City. She talks about what it was like to live in a closely-knit Jamaican family, and to grow up Black in an otherwise white neighborhood. She reflects on a summer spent in Italy working on a theater production with almost no other Black people nearby, and the ways she was looked at, touched, and talked to by those around her. She talks about realizing that she was Queer as a young adolescent, and finally finding love as a Black woman, in her 30’s, something she had pretty much given up hope in ever experiencing. She describes experiencing psychiatric crises at ages 13, 18, 24, 29.
Bainbridge’s writing is direct–no complicated metaphors, just good stories well told, filled with important detail and real emotion. The reader (well, me, anyway) is left to laugh and cry and wonder and question along with this thoughtful woman growing up in a world that is–both for her, and for me too–sometimes hard to sort out at the best of times.
Bainbridge describes hearing the N-word for the first time, spoken in a whisper, and the meaning it came to hold for her. She talks about visiting the burnt-out husk of a car, on a Jamaican hillside, and the stories told about it. She mourns the death of another woman, a writer, whose impact on her own life is huge. She writes in the first person; she writes in the third person; she writes in the present tense; she writes in the past tense. She writes; she writes; she writes – drawing me, you, us into her life. Our life. Life.
As a Disabled person, I was disappointed in her use of ableist (and outdated) language (“epileptic fits”) that she uses to describe Christians praying at church. Disappointed, but not, as a colleague sometimes says, surprised. Not surprised, I guess, because of the ubiquity of ableism and its markers.
As a person who identifies as Mad, I was even more disappointed by Bainbridge’s understanding of her “debilitating mental illness,” which she describes as a “disorder,” a “disease,” “incurable and chronic.” Of her bipolar disorder, she says she will “never be cured.”
Bainbridge writes, “Sometimes, mental illness just… is. And it has to be allowed just to be. There is no rhyme or reason, no origin, no moment at which everything went wrong. Some of us are just unlucky enough to struggle.” While I wouldn’t dream of telling her how to experience her life, I can say that all things–everything that we understand and experience–is always already constructed and political, by our culture, our society, and ourselves. These are facts, and they are inescapable. The work–at least for me, over the past few decades–is and has been to understand their construction and politics. A mentor, many years ago, suggested to me that a critical question to ask about things I seek to understand, is, “who benefits?” Here, I want to question who benefits from Bainbridge’s experiences as “disease,” “illness,” debilitation, incurability, and chronicity.
I have written elsewhere about my own experiences with Madness, and I can say that I (along with many of my brothers and sisters and others in Madness) am not ill, am not diseased, am not debilitated, nor incurable. As Liat Ben-Moshe wrote,
…mental illness is not a biological diagnosis but a social construction based on normative assumptions that are gendered/raced/classed… Altered states, anger, and pain should not be characterized as illness but as a consequence of a system of power and inequality that denies people their basic freedom and needs (2020, p. 140).
So I have come to reject the biomedical model of Madness, and to fight tooth and nail the saneism of the psy-complex, along with the white, neoliberal, settler, colonialist culture that spawned it.
A quarter of a century and more ago, Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins described what she called the matrix of domination or oppression (2000). This matrix describes the way that multiple expressions of oppression–race, gender, and homophobia, among others, are examples that are often given, and to which I add Disability and Madness–overlap and arise from hegemonic, patriarchal, white, neoliberalism. They are inseparable; they should be. The matrix is a single thing, expressing itself across a diverse set of apparently separate oppressions. To me, this matrix implies and requires that I unite in solidarity with others working to oppose the bits and pieces that they experience (and those they don’t) in order to end this domination and oppression. I unite with Black people and Queer people and my Disabled friends and my Mad colleagues–including Bainbridge–in this work. As Audre Lorde famously said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (1984).
Bainbridge wrote, “What is the name for the illness that wraps itself around the minds of Black/brown people until we are choking on our own necessary ingestion of air? What is the cure for a world so dead set on our madness?” As I reject the bio-medical creation of mental illness, I embrace myself as a Mad person, and welcome Bainbridge to consider herself a member of our Mad, Mad, Mad collective (if she doesn’t already do so).
References
Ben-Moshe, L. (2020). Decarcerating disability: Deinstitutionalization and prison abolition. University of Minnesota Press.
Collins, P. H. (2000) Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider. Crossing Press.
Title: Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays
Author: Danielle Bainbridge
Publisher: Jaded Ibis Press
Year: 2025
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About the Reviewer
Phil Smith is a retired Professor of Special Education, and Mad and Disabled. He’s published widely, including Writhing Writing: Moving Towards a Mad Poetics (2018); Tinfoil Hats: Stories by Mad People in an Insane World (2023); and A Mad Turn: Anti-methods of Mad Studies (2024). A poet, playwright, novelist, and visual artist, he lives in a small cabin without running water, with ravens, bears, and coyotes for neighbors.