Broken Whole

Described as "...probably the most entertaining account of mania you'll ever read...", this raw, inspirational, story shows that a man can live a full, productive life with a serious mental illness. In 2006, Keith, in the midst of an immense undiagnosed manic episode, cut a swath through the Corridor of Dreams - the swanky swathe of the West side of LA stretching from the Hollywood Hills to the boulevards of Beverly Hills, believing he would be an epochal intellectual cum gay Hollywood superstar cum spiritual messiah. Of course, he became none of these, and crashed spectacularly. With its tale of luxury goods, spiritual discovery, thrust for glory, brilliant ideas, not so brilliant ideas, one impersonation of the Anti-Christ, fist-fights, arrest by the LAPD, and, ultimately, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, it asks if the gleaming personality he became - now chained up by mood stabilizers - is the real self; and, if it is not, is there any such thing as a real self?

Keith Adams perennially wonders how an abnormally tall, working-class boy from the North Sea coast of England ended up in a house in Hollywood with two dogs, and his partner, a leading medical research scientist at UCLA. Although he writes for a living (computer code), he always hoped to do "real writing", from experience. That opportunity came from being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2006, after a serious brush with insanity. At one point, he seriously believed he would be a combination gay superstar / epochal intellectual / latter day Messiah. Quite obviously, he became none of those things, but he did survive the inevitable crash to tell the tale, thanks to the support of friends and family.