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.
Picking up five years after the action in