Living with bipolar disorder is difficult, even in these 'enlightened' times. Although the condition has nudged its way into public awareness, the stigma and the misconceptions persist. The little knowledge people acquire makes for countless lay-psychiatrists, innumerable armchair psychologists, and plenty of misdirected good intentions.

Terri Cheney lives with bipolar disorder. Her account of life with this condition is told in Manic: A Memoir. Her tale is unsentimental and unashamed. It does not seek to intellectualise, psychoanalyse, or even anesthetise the facts. It merely delivers an account of a life lived without greyscale.

The book is free of endless flowery rhetoric — though it is beautifully written — and this makes it deceptively easy to read. Even the non-sequential nature of the story fails to confuse. Bipolar is a bit like that anyway, like living life on shuffle. Hidden within these chapters are the triggers of many ill-remembered feelings. My copy of the book is festooned with sticky labels, markers of passages that resonate with me.

Cheney, on the electrification of the senses: "The little hairs loved hypomania: the world was suddenly all about textures and taste and sensations... until I felt like a blind man faced with too much Braille."

On the merciless and thankless mood-housekeeping one has to endure to stay well: "...I ruthlessly pinpointed the moment on the mood scale, skewered it like a dead butterfly. Happiness management was a cruel science. It may have kept me safe from unexpected butterflies, but it killed all the flutter and delight."

I could go on: the hypersexuality, drinking to polarise your mood in social situations, trying to work out who the hell you actually are after the mood disorder is taken out of the equation, and of course, the slow and hateful journey to acknowledgment that you are, by the layperson's view, mad. My markers are not your markers, and you may find yourself drawn to completely different pages - but you will be drawn.

Don't read this book if you're looking for answers. You won't find a blueprint for life. It doesn't speculate about causes, cures, or strategies. It won't tell you how to help your depressed spouse, how to manage your drugs, or convince you to take them at all. It will only tell you how it felt for Terri Cheney, and her story may give you reference points - a guide to understanding how it feels for others who live with manic depression.

It is a cautionary tale. The ending is hopeful, if only because she survived. The compromises she's made to reach this point are, perhaps, unpalatable. If you are inclined to read accounts of car-crash lives in order to make you feel complacent in your own sanity, remember the statistics. It's closer than you think.

I realise I really want my review to do this book justice. I really want lay-psychiatrists to read it. I really want armchair psychologists to spend a few pages getting under the skin of this illness and to walk a mile in Terri Cheney's shoes. I need those who would disregard the experiences as unbelievable to embrace the absurdity of life with bipolar, and to cross over into a different dimension where the rules simply don't apply.

Only then will you free your compassion.