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“I cannot promise this is exactly how it happened, but you can trust this is exactly how it felt.”

In The Sad Stays, Ashley Lumpkin weaves prose and poetry, intake form and erasure, screenplay and hymn, to explore the experience of living with mental illness. At turns humorous and heart-rending, this inventive memoir presents a portrait of bipolar disorder beyond its popular misconceptions.

Lumpkin invites us into her conversations with doctors, therapists, and friends, and we witness the effects the illness has on her relationships, both romantic and platonic. She wrestles with questions of identity, faith, and responsibility in the face of a disease she can barely control. 

The Sad Stays offers us a new, lyrical lens through which to comprehend a widely stigmatized and misunderstood illness.

“Once I started reading Ashley Lumpkin's, The Sad Stays, I couldn't put it down. It is an easy read that is interestingly honest, wildly familiar, and satirically fearless. Ashley's poetry always packs a punch, but her work as a storyteller is the wallop we didn't know we needed. “ -Ebony Stewart, author of Home.Girl.Hood & BloodFresh “The Sad Stays pushes back against the sterility and stark lights of a clinical diagnosis and brings readers face to face with the prodigious monster known as bipolar disorder. Ashley’s raw, unflinching honesty reminds us that this battle occurs on many fronts – physical, spiritual, relational, and cultural – and in the darkest times, survival is often counted in minutes, not days. This memoir is her testament to the revival of the human spirit.” -Ginger Holloway