Joyce and Walky!

I was most definitely misusing the term “bipolar disorder” here for Joyce in this situation, though I think an undercurrent of its actual symptoms (or something else with some similar symptoms like borderline personality disorder) runs through a lot of my Walkyverse characters as I kind of grew up in an environment that was this … cocktail of various mental illnesses.  You write what you know, and alternating between mania and depression is just what all people do, you know?  Wait, it’s not?  Oh.  Huh!  Well.

In the Walkyverse, that “cocktail of mental illnesses” was a homogeneous soup that many of my characters shared as narrative needs required, but in Dumbing of Age I try to allocate that stuff out a little more specifically.