u/HudsonBunny

I’ve been an avid Hannah Murray fan for a number of years, admiring her moving, often heartbreaking portrayals of damaged women – from desperately obsessive Cassie Ainsworth in Skins to vulnerable Sara in Bridgend to the coldly, cruelly used Sylvia Ageloff in The Chosen to the deluded, murderous Leslie Van Houten in Charlie Says. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every film, music video, and television episode, no matter how obscure, she’s appeared in. 

I had also watched countless interviews on YouTube and elsewhere that showed Hannah to be a lovely, gracious, and thoughtful young woman who eschewed social media as narcissistic, who warmly spoke of her castmates in familial terms, and who jealously guarded her private life.

I really liked who I thought Hannah Murray was.

So when she announced that she was writing a memoir accounting how she became involved with a “wellness organization” that led to a psychotic break, confinement to a mental institution for a month, and ultimately being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I immediately pre-ordered the book – a year before the planned publication date. I even ordered from Amazon UK and paid the steep shipping cost rather than wait an extra month for the US release.

The book conveniently arrived the day before I was to leave on a long business trip, and I thought it would give me something to read during my travels.

Instead, I opened the book in the Uber on the way to the airport and was immediately yanked into a story that I could not stop reading: In the two-page prologue she’s in a mental hospital, heavily hallucinating, and believing that she’s there to heal all the other patients. I got to the last page a mere day later.

The first thing Hannah Murray did was eviscerate my silly notions of who Hannah Murray was. She tells about being an odd, imaginative child who wanted to believe worlds of fantasy and magic could be real, and then an angry teenager who found sudden fame at seventeen when she landed a starring role in Skins with no previous acting experience. Although not anorexic like the fictional Cassie, she had a complicated relationship with food, a difficult relationship with her parents, and a tendency toward self-harm. And, significantly, was prone to extreme emotional highs and lows. That tendency was exacerbated by her career over the next ten years, bouncing between the highs of starring roles to the lows of unemployment, the grinds of auditioning for the next job, and dealing with the industry’s rank objectivization of women: As she puts it, sitting in business meetings negotiating what body parts she would be willing to show. Through it all was a life of hard partying, heavy alcohol and drug use, and promiscuous sex. Yet her only thought for her physical wellbeing seemed to be an ongoing concern that she smoked too much. It was a life in which if she wanted to throw a party, she rented out a nightclub. If she wanted to have a dinner party, she rented out a restaurant. She’d become sexually obsessed with people who weren’t interested in her and quickly bored with people who were interested in her. If she wanted to end a romantic relationship, she did it by having sex with someone else. She dealt with the minor annoyances every young person has with their parents by avoiding seeing hers for a year or two.

I found myself not liking Hannah Murray at all.

But I only knew that I didn’t like her because she was so brutally honest about herself. She had brought me into the world of someone with an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. The connection she makes with the reader is so intimate, that when she begins her descent into madness she takes you right down with her.

She had for some time been reading self-help books to try to deal with her deep depressions, which she calls her “gateway drug” into what followed. During the filming of the movie Detroit, in which her character is sexually assaulted by a police officer, she was already in an emotionally dark place. She was battered and bruised from a week of scenes in which she was slapped, beaten, and thrown against walls. Then came the assault scene, and a rack full of identical dresses because they would be doing repeated takes of the policeman ripping her dress off her. The intensity of filming the scene over and over and over left her physically ill. A friend on the set suggested that Hannah take an “energy healing” session, and this was her introduction into what she calls “the organization.”

Most of the book is Ms. Murray taking the reader along, in excruciating detail, on her gradual seduction by what was not just an organization but a cult. The more she described, the more the outside observer in me wanted to shout, how could you be so dim as to fall for such blatant New Age pseudo-spiritual claptrap while letting them fleece you of thousands of pounds? But the remarkable thing about her narrative is that you’re not just along as an outraged observer; she puts you inside her mind. And from that perspective the manipulative rituals, her developing delusions, and her gradual disconnect from reality are all more sympathetic. As she puts it, the boiled frog phenomenon.

The actor who had made a career of portraying vulnerable women was herself horribly vulnerable. Her bipolar disorder meant that the cult’s exploitation was sending her spiraling deeper and deeper into psychosis.

When the psychotic break finally comes during one of the cult’s training classes, you experience the madness right along with her. Appallingly, the cult nutjobs try to perform an exorcism on her before finally calling the authorities for help.

Her sectioning was far from the end of it. The early publicity about what happened usually read, “Game of Thrones actress reveals that she was sectioned for a mental breakdown.” That sounds so sterile, like someone going to the hospital to get an appendix removed. But in her own words, “I was not well when I left hospital… I did not enter ill and left well. I entered extremely psychotic and left somewhat less so.” And later, “The reality was that I was still out of my mind. All my delusions were still intact; the hospitalization had done nothing to shake them. I had walked out of the ward and straight back into the arms of the people who put me there.”

She went right back to the cult and its training. But she kept her appointments with a psychiatrist who diagnosed her as bipolar, and she took the medication he prescribed, even though she thought she was appeasing the authorities through feigned compliance. Cleverly fooling them into letting her stay out of the hospital. 

But the medication and perhaps the counseling gave her just enough lucidity to begin seeing the cult through a more skeptical lens. The magic gradually stopped working and the delusions faded.

Living a quiet life in a small town in East Anglia, it’s hard to say whether Hannah is fully recovered. She’s happy to be away from acting, living a much healthier lifestyle, and has rebuilt her relationship with her parents. She’s pursuing a mentally healthier new career as a writer, and I for one look forward to her first novel. If Hannah Murray’s future work carries the raw emotional impact of The Make-Believe, she will make her mark as one of the most important writers of this decade.

John Steinbeck said, “You can only understand people if you can feel them in yourself.”  Ms. Murray’s courage in what she is willing to share about herself, coupled with a gripping narrative style that welcomes you into her own mind certainly made me feel her within myself. It’s a remarkable book. And, yes, I like Hannah Murray after all.

I’m leaving for a long trip today, and excited to read it on the plane.

[EDIT] I read the intro and first chapter in an Uber on the way to the airport, and this is a can't-put-it-down book! Wonderfully written and engrossing from the first page, which opens with her in a mental institution, heavily hallucinating, and believing that she is there to heal all the other patients. The first chapter jumps to her filming the movie Detroit, and the mental and emotional impact of her filming the scene in which her character is sexually assaulted by a police officer, a scene that had to be performed over and over and over. She was in an emotionally dark place already, but determined get the scene right both as a professional and also because the woman the assault actually happened to was on set, and Hannah was doubly determined to get the scene right for her. She then goes into her background, how she grew up unusually obsessed with magic and myth, and the kinds of characters she gravitated to -- many, many damaged women. Already in her career she had depicted suicide multiple times -- the first being Cassie's suicide attempt in Skins, which she says she had to swallow over 100 white TicTacs during the filming and recalls the sweet, sticky liquid she vomited in her trailer afterwards. The chapter ends with a friend on the Detroit set recommending "spiritual healing" and her obsession with self-help books that she calls the "gateway drug" into weird spiritual and healing beliefs.