Mercy Gene: The Man-Made Making of a Mad Woman is a tender, vulnerable, and humorous telling of one person’s journey with mental illness—or, I think it’s more appropriate to say one person’s attempts to reconcile (silence, speak nicely to, and negotiate with) the voices in their head. The novel is told in fragments, in the way that memory works, a series of scattered moments that pop into awareness and gather together to create a story, a life. Throughout the book, we meet Janice, Jan, and JD—three versions of a person as they come to know themselves. The story centres around the character’s rape at age thirteen. The author explores the patriarchy’s role in creating a world in which something like this could happen, in which the girl it happened to would feel she couldn’t tell anyone for decades, and in which that person would be certified, drugged, and hospitalized. The book is full of so much sad and perfect insight into the patriarchal world JD came of age in, I wanted them to continue to explain the world to me long after the pages of this book ended.

There is tenderness here, in JD’s relationship with their mother, their daughter, and a childhood neighbour, Edwin/Raquel, who taught Janice that “there’s all kinds of love, all kinds.” Edwin/Raquel would name young Janice Peter, as requested, dress Peter up in men’s clothes, and allow him to join dance parties with the “in-betweens.” There is exploration of the gender binary here, too, and how JD landed on they/them, but describes themselves as “a woman filled up with the lightness of a little boy.” This book gave to me everything I look for when I read—a way to see the world through someone else’s eyes that at times resonated with my own view and at other times opened my mind to something new and different—and always in a manner filled with hope.

JD Derbyshire (they/them) is a West Coast-based comedian, theatre maker, writer, and mad activist, whose work examines mental health, neurodiversity, queerness, and gender exploration. Derbyshire has toured Canada as a standup comedian and solo performer; has written over 20 plays that have been produced by companies in Victoria, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver; and cohosts the mental health podcast Mad Practice. Their play, Certified, turns the audience into a mental health review board to determine Derbyshire’s sanity by the end of the show. Certified won two Jesse Richardson theatre awards in Vancouver for best script and the Critic’s Innovation Award. Their recently published auto-fiction novel, Mercy Gene; The Man-Made Making of a Mad Woman, was described by Miriam Toews as, “an incredible book that lifted me right up off the ground.”