something josephine sent:

You assocciate madness with Zelda Fitzgerald in all her rich gorgeous, cerebral disturbedness, or maybe you think of it as something that members of Aureliano Buendia's family sank into the incestuous end of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Madness is something of the fiery hot tempers of Latin America of the Deep South of Borges and Cotazar or William Faulkner and Tennessee Willimas. [...] The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quest for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony

While it may be true that a great deal of art finds its inspirational wellspring in sorrow, let's not kid ourselves about how much time each of those people wasted and lost by being mired in misery [... ] This is not to say that we should deny sadness its rightful place among the muses of poetry and of all art forms, but let's stop calling it madness, let's stop pretending that the feeling itself is interesting.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation