When someone in the marketing department at the publisher reached out about this because I’d positively reviewed David Chang’s Eat a Peach, I had to take a few minutes to really think if I wanted to go back into this world.*
In Chang’s book, his mental health struggles are peripheral, but in Dunn’s Burn Rate, he centers them. I spent quite a bit of time reading about bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and other mental health issues before my mom died a few years ago to try and understand what she was going through and what my sister and I were experiencing. And that REALLY hit home when the first quote Dunn uses in his book is a quote from Kay Redfield Jamison who wrote THE book (An Unquiet Mind) about brains and bipolar/manic depression/brains in general.
When I saw this on NetGalley I knew I was going to request it.* I remember the news stories of Bailar joining the Harvard University swim team and being the first trans athlete to compete on any NCAA D1 Men’s team and when I saw he wrote this I knew I wanted to read it.
My jaw legit hurt after I was reading this because my mouth kept hanging open at the sheer audacity of the companies, politicians, and countries in this book. Seriously though, let’s just say that, this is one of those books that if I used only emoji’s to review books would just be