The subtitle of Moezzi’s memoir is “A bipolar life” which tends to suggest what the major focus of the book will be about, and so it was with some surprise when I discovered that “bipolar” had an awful lot less to do with the story than “a life” did. This might sound like a complaint, but it isn’t remotely. Melody Moezzi is an amazing writer, sharp and witty and very funny, describing life as a young Iranian woman raised by her family in the American midwest, balancing those two sides of her world and cultures in a pre- and post-9/11 world. The trickier bit happens when her own brain, which is the thing trying to do all that balancing, is itself off-kilter and goes to pieces as bipolar rears its ugly head.

If you came looking for lots of note-taking information about bipolar, you’ll be kind of disappointed, but that’s okay. There’s other books for that. This is, instead, a great memoir that is exciting (and frequently very funny, even in seemingly dark or bleak moments). I read it in a single day, too charmed to even think about stopping.