Author Lizzy Mason Explores Coming of Age and Mental Illness in "Between the Bliss and Me"

When readers first meet Sydney Holman, the main character of Lizzy Mason’s new novel Between the Bliss and Me, she has just made a life-changing decision. Instead of staying at home for college in suburban New Jersey, Sydney has decided to move to New York City to attend NYU.

But Sydney’s choice is a fraught one for her mother, who has always shielded her daughter from the real reason Sydney’s father hasn’t been around. Sydney is shocked to learn that her father has schizophrenia and has been living on the streets of Manhattan for several years. She is also startled to discover that because schizophrenia has a genetic component, her mother is terrified that there is a chance Sydney would also be diagnosed with the condition one day.

When Sydney decides to pursue her dreams in the city despite her mother’s worries, she also realizes that this is her chance to discover what really happened to her father and sets out to find him — a story author Lizzy Mason told the FBomb she hopes will open up a conversation about how Americans view mental health conditions.

Between the Bliss and Me will be released on April 6 by Soho Teen. We had the chance to chat with Mason about her sophomore novel, family secrets, and why it is important to have honest conversations about topics many people want to avoid.

Both Between the Bliss and Me and your debut novel, The Art of Losing, explored mental health issues through the eyes of teens. Why are you drawn to these topics?

It’s funny you ask that because people always say to me, ‘Why do you write such sad books?’ I was diagnosed with depression when I was 14, so this is something that I've dealt with for more than half of my life. It affected me so much, especially as a teenager, because I was constantly questioning how I was reacting to things and whether I was good enough, and whether I was like other people. It really shaped who I was as a person.

But, especially when I was a teenager, I was really reluctant to accept my diagnosis. It wasn’t until I went on a cross-country road trip with my sister after I graduated that things really came to a head. At the end of the trip, my sister said to me, ‘You have to get on medication. You have to take care of this because you are making yourself miserable.’ That’s what made me finally go to a psychiatrist and get on medication, and it was life-changing.

Do you see yourself in your character Sydney? Throughout the early chapters of the book, she is very reluctant to accept that she has a family history of mental illness.

Definitely. Sydney's anxiety is very much drawn from my own experience. I also sort of see myself in her father, who was very reluctant to accept his diagnosis and the fact that he has to take medication for it to feel normal. I understand that reluctance to not want to take medication, but I also understand how life-changing it is to be on the right medication.

Sydney is interesting because she makes a lot of fairly typical teenage mistakes when it comes to partying and underage drinking, but because she doesn’t know her family history she doesn’t understand why her mother and grandparents react so harshly. Did you also want to show how keeping this kind of family secret can be harmful?

I think a lot of families keep secrets from each other without really understanding why. I think that adults often feel the need to protect kids and teenagers in a way that they don't really need. Kids, especially if they are teenagers, can handle a lot more reality than we give them credit for.

The stigma of mental illness permeates so much of our society that people are afraid to talk about it, or are embarrassed to talk about it, which just perpetuates the problem in a way. But something that Sydney realizes relatively quickly in the story is that her family isn't keeping this secret to keep her safe. They're keeping it because it's embarrassing to them and because they don't want to deal with it. She realizes that the secret reflects on their characters more than it does hers, which I think is interesting.

As Sydney learns about what happened to her father, she also begins to question why there aren’t better resources to take care of those with severe mental illness and learns the historical reasons for why our current system exists. Did you also learn this history for the first time while writing this book?

Before I started researching, I knew very little of the history of the mental health system and how we got to the broken place that we are today. There's a suggested reading list at the back of the book, and that list was my research before I started writing. Every one of those books really influenced the story in a way.

In particular, there were a couple of books that I read in the very beginning of the writing process that were by parents of children who had mental illnesses like schizophrenia that were really eye-opening in a way that I would never have even been able to predict. I also read a lot of stories about the way mentally ill people are treated in prisons and how prisons are often used as housing for mentally ill people because there's such a lack of availability for programs for people in hospitals.

The more research I did, the more the story changed and took on new layers. And it was really an incredible experience to learn this history, but it was also really devastating to learn just how broken our society is when it comes to mental illness and care.

What would you like your teen readers in particular to take away from Sydney’s story?

I want them to come away from the book with the idea that it's OK if you're not OK. I want people to not be afraid to ask for help if they need it. And I really want people to understand how useful medication can be in treating mental illness. I absolutely understand why somebody like Sydney's father made the choice to not be on medication, and I think there's a real struggle between personal rights and not forcing someone to get treatment against their will. I don't think there are any good answers, just as there is no happy ending that's tied up with a bow in this book.

But I think that having these conversations about mental health and making it so that we can talk about it openly as a society is going to lead to more people being open to taking medication. I think that's really important.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.