The Monster and the Mirror is a cultural criticism that explores how pop culture affects real life. It questions tropes like what is mad and sane, who the real monsters are, and how society as a whole reacts to those with mental health struggles. It's an intriguing premise told through a world of make believe but has a very real impact.

The book is a memoir of the author's life, particularly their (and their family's) struggles with mental illness and the problems (pointedly economic) that those situations can bring. The author brings their relationship with works of fantasy, particularly works of fantasy writing and other 'genre' works into play as one of the key mediators for their understanding and exploration of their life in general, but particularly in regards to mental illness and the things that fantasy has to say about it.

I feel conflicted. Disclosing my own trauma here feels gauche for doing it in a review, but also in the way it feels like I am disclosing some sort of financial interest, as if our respective rage ghosts receive the same subsidies from the Darkness Inalienable so I am unable to write an unbiased piece. And I disliked the non-memoir bits. The cultural criticism here is low effort. I want to nerdfight the author and well actually on just about every example, and how their interpretation leaves so much on the table as to feel disingenuous. So much feels perfunctory, like the author was being forced at gunpoint to write a college essay on all these rich and substantive topics.

But on the more creative nonfiction parts of this nonfiction, wow. The book does not read like fantasy literature, but the sort of pace of the tides of the role of fantasy and the creative life in the author's overall life supercharge the text. To describe the story such as it is of it would feel like something you've read countless times before, but I'm here to say, no, you haven't. It is searing and affecting, maybe weakened by the occasional gap to the story but it seems like mostly there to protect people in real life.

To the extent that the memoir bits evidence or otherwise mirror the bits of fantasy or mental health tropes being explored in the critical bits, as they are usually structured to do, it shows that the author knows just how to employ the ideas and concepts that they discuss, just do not seem to have a great sense of description around their pragmatic use. But whatever weakness comes out in the author's ability to describe it, their ability to put the ideas to effective and emotional use outweighs it repeatedly. That is the right direction to have the problem.

As someone who has mental health struggles including depression and PTSD I was very intrigued to read and learn about the links between fantasy and mental health.