World Mental Health Day will be celebrated at the Wales Millennium Centre this year with the launch of a novel Bamboo Grove, set in Bangkok, with a bipolar teenager as its main character. Manic depressive author Romy Wood looks at the extremes of life in the Far East through the eyes of Jessica, a young woman who also has the disorder.
Precarious at the best of times and vulnerable to exotic job offers, Jessica meets Moses, a pseudo-Buddhist monk and Pippa, a Romanian illegal immigrant, and is sent to Bangkok by a quixotic pair of young businessmen. All become intricately, messily bound by the unique and rather dubious organization that is Eastern Vision. The empire has one foot in the seedier realms of metaphysical Surrey and the other amongst the slums and skyscrapers of the City of Angels.
From faux-Eastern objets to real estate, client-centred sperm-donation to gypsy magic, the tangled fortunes of Eastern Vision go from strength to strength and back again. Bamboo Grove is a very funny satire about sex, financial boom and bust, corruption, cultural collision, fertility, altruism and unethical tourism.
Mother of three, Open University tutor and author Romy Wood is always creative and hugely practical about having had to be in and out of hospital while she wrote the novel and indeed in the weeks approaching the launch itself. Determined to be there on the day, Friday 8 October (7.30pm), she laughs that “they wouldn’t dare keep me in for something as important to me as this,” adding,
“It is so fortuitous that my novel is published for World Mental Health Day because its strong central character Jessica suffers from bipolar disorder but isn’t defined by it. Since Stephen Fry’s flagship documentary, The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive, bipolar disorder has begun to lose its stigma. I don’t pretend that my novel will have the same impact but it does show a family affected by this disorder within a story of global settings and concerns. I hope that someone equally as prominent as Stephen Fry will publicise their personal experience of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses in order to break down prejudice.”
Romy Wood taught drama in comprehensive schools for ten years. She works as an associate Lecturer for the Open University. This novel is informed by her experiences of Romania and Thailand, where she has friends and family, as it is by Romy’s life as a woman with Bipolar Disorder. She lives with her husband and three children in Cardiff.
Bamboo Grove ISBN 9780956012517 is published on 8 October 2010 by Y Lolfa
