Cynthia Mitchell is a writer, psychologist and psychoanalyst from Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moved to Paris in 2009, and in 2018 she became a French citizen. Cynthia worked as the Global Counselor for New York University in Paris for ten years and then worked for three semesters at NYU in Buenos Aires.
Her short stories appear in the international journal, Per Contra. Hand Me the River, her first novel, was published in 2019 and is available on Apple Books, Amazon, and other digital platforms.
Cynthia is interviewed by Françoise Schall-Wakai, author of Heurs et malheurs d’un restaurateur à Paris.
a Paris Writers News interview
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Françoise Schall-Wakai (FSW): Hello Cynthia ,
While enjoying the progression of the story, the narrative and the main characters, I also learned a lot about bipolar disorder. The questions below follow my thread of thought while and after reading your book.
What inspired you to write Hand Me the River, and how did you choose the title ?
Cynthia Mitchell (CM): When the title, Hand Me the River, occurred to me, it felt perfect. It’s in the main character’s voice. Lily is speaking, asking to hold all of life in her hands, yet a river, like time, is impossible to grasp. The title captures Lily’s vast desires and the fleeting nature of our experiences.
I was inspired to write the story by the experiences with love and with psychiatric hospitals that I had in my twenties. While it’s not exactly my story, Lily’s perceptions, her shifts of thought and her sometimes wild associations are known to me. I wanted to convey the feeling of excitement from the inside, the ways that her world makes sense to her even as it may not to others, and also the way it feels to lose that world and that exhilaration. I wanted to describe the power and mystery of love and how we are changed by people who recognize — or fail to recognize — us.
The young people I’ve known have often shared concerns that resonate with Lily’s story — whether about the pressure from parents, the constraints of society, the difficulty figuring out how to use their talents, fears of not being good enough, or about the wish to love and to be loved.
FSW: While reading Hand Me the River, I had flashbacks of people I encountered in my life. And after having read your book I could see them differently. Was your intent to make bipolar disorder more accessible to a broader audience? Do you think such depictions can increase the general public’s empathy for people with bipolar disorder?
CM: If I’ve made bipolar illness more accessible, I’m very glad. I was most interested in describing Lily’s wishes, her struggles and her disarray. I wanted readers to experience Lily’s world not from the position of an observer watching Lily careen through life but, instead, from the inside — to have the reader feel what it’s like to be that person careening through life. I also wanted to show that one can recover, that life with such an illness or after such an illness can be full and rich. All sorts of people — judges, car mechanics, teachers, doctors — have this illness and manage it successfully.
At the same time, bipolar illness is only one aspect of Lily’s story. The larger story is one all of us share — how to be one’s full self without losing connections to family and friends, how to claim one’s own life and also live within the constraints of society.
FSW: I found Lily’s manic episodes quite engaging, the way you describe how her own world and “energy expand”. She says : “it astounds me to see things from so many different places” (…) “ I’m dissolving”(…) Could you share how you were able to describe Lily’s episodes so vividly to enable the reader to imagine them?
CM: In my twenties, I had manic episodes and experienced many feelings like those of my character, Lily. After I recovered, I feared that I might lose those feelings of expansive love and excitement. In part, I wrote this novel to preserve them. I drew on my memories and on journals that I kept at the time in order to create my protagonist, Lily.
FSW: Nick is an intriguing character. His attitude of passively encouraging Lily's desire for him was notable throughout the book. By not saying much about Nick, readers can draw their own portrait of him. Is Nick typical of a man who gives just enough hope to keep the romance alive or does he have a more profound significance ? Could Nick be the protagonist of another story?
Readers have had different reactions to Nick. I attended a book group on zoom in which one man despised Nick while another saw some of Nick in himself. Several women have said, “Oh, yes, I had a Nick in my life.”
Some see him as a cad, a scoundrel. Others see him as charismatic and enchanting. Nick provides a space for people to express themselves, he is accepting of all sorts of people, and he validates their creative efforts. He doesn’t always see how attached others, particularly women, get to him. Or perhaps he doesn’t want to see that. He becomes attached to Lily in his way, and at the end of the story he is able to let her know how she affected him.
FSW: Lily says : “Flirting. People who are flirting will say anything at all. If that click, click feeling is in the air, they could say blah, blah, blah and it would be just fine, maybe even thrilling.” There is humor and also poetry in what Lily expresses : “Why do some people get love to keep while I am like a flimsy scarf floating through that place where love is?” Who is the poet? Lily in her manic phase or is she simply channeling the author's poetry?
CM: I’m the writer and the poet. I am all of Lily though she is only a sliver of me.
FSW: You describe brilliantly how the lithium made Lily’s life “dull” and how she was trying to control herself. But the therapy had limited effects and a mood regulator was necessary. Lily asked herself : “Is this how life is?” (…) “Lithium makes me want to cancel my life, as if it were a magazine subscription and I could order a different one.” Do you think that mood regulators necessarily imply to give up a part of the brighter, more exuberant side of the personality and excitement in life?
CM: No, I don’t mean imply that. Not at all. It takes time to adjust to lithium and that period can feel extremely difficult and can be a significant loss when it occurs, as Lily describes. These feelings of loss are temporary and when one gets through it one can have a full range of feelings again though not the extreme highs and lows.
Though perhaps I didn’t clearly portray this in the novel, I believe the impact of psychotherapy to be as powerful, or more powerful, than that of lithium. One needs to be able to make sense of all that occurred. What fueled her mania? Were there earlier losses that she had not acknowledged? But Lily couldn’t hear or absorb what her doctors offered without first being stable again with the help of lithium. So in her case, lithium and psychotherapy worked together.
FSW: She works at a law firm and becomes a better lawyer having more empathy for “eccentric” clients. So, is this a positive side of her bipolar disorder in the end? Can you tell us more?
CM: Yes, she gains a more complex and nuanced view of herself and those around her. She knows from her own experience that a person can be in what doctors consider serious trouble and come out the other side. This gives her hope for her clients, eccentric and otherwise, because she knows things can get better. She learns to step out of her own shoes and to see how the world might appear or feel in the shoes of her clients. She is not put off or afraid of another’s person’s mind and she learns to look for the meaning behind odd language and disturbing behaviors, to understand what sense those things make through the eyes of the other person.
FSW: I could imagine your book as a movie. Would you consider writing a screenplay one day?
CM: I love that you asked this. I’ve also imagined it as a movie with scenes set in Haymarket in Boston, in Cambridge, and on Martha’s Vineyard. When I first began to write this story, I wrote it as a screenplay but I didn’t have the skill to get inside Lily’s mind in that format. There are many vivid scenes and dramatic moments. I would love to have a screenwriter bring Lily’s world to life.
FSW: Will there be a second volume about Lily or sequel to her story?
CM: I’m working on a new book which I’m calling Burst of Flame. It’s not a sequel to Lily’s story but the characters are part of Lily’s extended family. Sylvie, the narrator of Burst of Flame is Lily’s cousin. Their grandfather, James, who was described in Hand Me the River as “exuberant and headstrong” and who “loved betting on the horses,” is an important character. In this book, Sylvie struggles to understand herself and her mother, Anna, as Sylvie inadvertently discovers her mother’s secrets.
Hand Me the River by Cynthia Mitchell
