Duality acts as a mode of understanding in Danielle Bainbridge’s affecting memoir, Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays, which casts a dandelion as “a beautiful flower and a steadfast weed”—a cherished nickname for her, given by her father and aunt. An Assistant Professor of Theatre, Black Studies, and Performance Studies at Northwestern University, Bainbridge writes with searing honesty, characterizing her passage through chronic illness with a compelling perspective that draws on her cultural background while paying due respect to her academic expertise. Dandelion is a symphonic ode to Black selfhood, feminist values, and life with a bipolar diagnosis.
“Was love something that she was entitled to as a sad Black girl?” Bainbridge wonders, slipping into third-person narration, her choice of narrative style creating a perception of distance from the trauma at hand. “She did not want to think of herself as a fundamentally fragile and damaged thing. She wanted to become something more dynamic than that. Wanted to live in the sun and the shade in equal measure, rather than always trembling in the long cast shadows of her own mind.” The dynamism, however, and her plasticity are denied to her again and again. The loss of the “privilege of privacy” in repeated hospitalizations causes her to reject help where it is given. “She knows she cannot be left alone anymore, not while she’s here,” she writes of the psychiatric ward, its invasive control over her body.
For Bainbridge, the initial diagnoses she receives of psychotic breaks serve to entrench her in fear about “the frailty of the body [. . .] its inevitable infirmity.” Her understanding of a psychotic break is that it is something that “feels sharp and stinging in her ear so she will only repeat this diagnosis to herself.” Housed in the hospital, alone with her thoughts, she remembers that those who “loved her most” had always been trying to “fix” her; that this “was not the first time she had been made to feel broken.” However, in the case of psychosis, the mind turning inward against itself, “A break signaled a rupture, something that she was unprepared and ill-equipped to fix.”
To express herself—to guard against this loss—Bainbridge resorts to writing a letter to Maya Angelou upon the poet’s death, confessing to the deceased writer the consequences of being denied space:
“I held my tongue and my silence close to my heart. I was a silent Black girl.”
Dandelion juxtaposes college and graduate school acceptance letters with emergency room plastic wristbands and discharge notes, informing the reader of Bainbridge’s hospitalizations at thirteen, eighteen, twenty-four, and twenty-nine while emphasizing a record of academic success in spite of adversity. “In the midst of my instability, school was the only constant. I had been trained from an early age to think of education as a contest,” Bainbridge writes. Her dedication to educational advancement arises partly in response to outside opinions she finds troubling: “If being a writer seemed like a far-fetched and foreign profession to the people in my life, a doctorate signaled a certain kind of stability and legitimacy.”
While Bainbridge is in court for jury duty, she stumbles upon the privilege that education has provided her. As a Black man is sentenced, vulnerable in “his thin Black body and bowed head,” she realizes that jail—and the ideology of the court—had irrevocably changed the lives of those she knows: “. . . it changed the shape of them.” Yet, for the town superior court, “Giving six adult years away to grad school counted as a hardship” enough to qualify her to absent herself from jury duty for job interviews. While the man’s future is shaped by his punishing sentencing, her educational privilege has, alternatively, changed her relationship to the present counsel: “Men who were once in law school [. . .] who had ambitions for themselves and for their careers,” whom she believes understand her aspirations toward a career and a better life, but not without recognizing the systemic obstacles she’ll have to face.
Balancing a personal diagnosis without the healing powers of sunlight and shared air can exacerbate loneliness, and Bainbridge’s ardent storytelling derives its strength not only from her insightful analysis of her own mental health journey but also from her negotiation of distance and proximity with the influences in her life: the friends and family, as well as acquaintances and strangers and disparate medical professionals, who help her inhabit herself more fully. The supposed “shyness” in her personality, through her father’s revisioning, becomes her positive attribute of being “contemplative and reserved.” By actively reaching out through the letter to Dr. Angelou, a memento of her hiding her crying as a child, “The little girl in the tub, scared to nick her finger on the edge of her tongue, gave way all at once to an actress, a writer, a lover, a friend, a sister, a beauty, an intellect that I could claim without shame or compromise.”
Bainbridge’s decision to employ a raw style of writing—familiar and overtly direct—asks of her reader an impassioned response, with its immediate, fluid, unfinished effect creating room for strong emotions, while generating an altered affect that convincingly relays psychological dislocation. She unpacks her feelings of confusion regarding race and colorism while abroad in Italy, as instances of refused connection cause her to question her beliefs—and how “elastic” she truly is in her thinking about kinship and community. At home, and abroad as an international member of a theatre troupe—“the equivalent of a traveling circus in the small hillside town where we were staying”—Bainbridge’s story considers with care the close encounters that shape her trajectory, sending her on her way to recover her inner peace.
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