The Daily Whatever Show, Nov 5: Book Release! with Kerry Beth Neville

The morning after a blue-wave election night, Lawrence and I were buzzing on caffeine and relief when

Kerry Neville

joined us — memoirist, professor, and the author of Mama May Be Mad, a hauntingly beautiful new book about mental illness, motherhood, and recovery.

Kerry is one of those writers who can talk about pain without glamorizing it. She told us how she spent years navigating bipolar disorder, eating disorders, self-harm, and addiction. A psychiatrist once told her, flat-out, she was a hopeless case. “If you’re Gen X,” she said, “you hear that and think: oh yeah? Watch me.”

Her recovery wasn’t linear. At 38, she underwent 25 electroshock treatments that erased years of memory — including much of her children’s early childhood. “I had to reconstruct my life from fragments,” she told us. “Medical records, journals, emails, what other people remembered about me.” That process became the spine of Mama May Be Mad, a book about losing your sense of self and then rebuilding it word by word.

As a GenX woman, Kerry’s story hit home. We talked about the mythology we inherited — that we could “have it all” — and how that message left so many of us exhausted before forty. She said it plainly: “You can have it all, but not without cost. Something always gets pushed aside.”

We laughed too, because Kerry’s humor sneaks through the heartbreak. She described an actual exorcism a priest once performed on her during her darkest days. (“It didn’t work,” she deadpanned. “But it makes for a great read.”)

Between politics, motherhood, and writing through trauma, the thread was resilience — that stubborn Gen X defiance that refuses to quit, even when told to. Kerry’s prose carries that same energy: tender, fierce, and deeply alive.

Thank you

Nick Paro

,

Polly Walker Blakemore

,

Char Sundust

,

Cat

,

John Pearce😀🦋🌈 🦅🌻

, and many others for joining us today.

We love you all, mean it!

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Join us tomorrow when

Ellie Leonard

joins us to share her latest deep-dive research into the Epstein Files.