NYC-Feature Story

It’s Kind of a Funny Story
An interview with author Ned Vizzini

By Marsha Dupiton

It’s Kind of a Funny Story, a novel by Ned Vizzini, tells the story of Craig, a New York City teenager suffering from depression who eventually checks himself into a psychiatric hospital.

It all starts when Craig gets into a competitive high school. The academic pressures build up and Craig turns to marijuana and loses his appetite. He sees several psychologists and starts to take antidepressants. After a while, he thinks that he is suddenly cured and stops taking his meds, which pushes him further toward the edge. He makes a plan to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, but calls a suicide hotline first, and they convince him to go to the hospital.

At the ward, he becomes friends with several other patients and gains some perspective. He also begins drawing odd pictures with maps, something he hasn’t done since he was little, which brings him bliss and escape. Craig is discharged after five days, determined to enjoy his life to the fullest.

I interviewed Ned Vizzini over e-mail to find out more about his book and what inspired it. Vizzini, like Craig, suffers from depression and wrote the novel after his own stay in a psychiatric hospital in Brooklyn.

NYC: Can you describe your own experience of being in a psychiatric hospital?

Ned Vizzini: My own experience of being in the psych hospital was very much like Craig’s. The big difference is that I was 23, not 15, and I went because of a different kind of pressure: I was supposed to write a book, and the book wasn’t working. One night I couldn’t take it anymore, I called the hotline, and the hospital is where I ended up.

NYC: Why did you choose to make your main character a teen, when the events that inspired the novel happened to you as an adult?

Vizzini: From a practical standpoint, I was under contract to produce a young adult novel. From an artistic standpoint, I have always maintained that high school is perhaps the most primal arena for human emotion. And the pressures that I faced as a 23-year-old are increasingly faced by 15-year-olds. As our culture of crazy expectations dumps pressure on younger and younger people, it’s appropriate and accurate to write about a 23-year-old’s pressure experienced by high school students.

NYC: You wrote the book in about a month. How were you able to do that?

Vizzini: About a week after I left the hospital, I began writing about my time there. The people I met there jumped out at me as not just great characters, but great spirits whose insights needed to be preserved. A plot materialized out of thin air. As to how I felt while writing it, I was almost in a trance.

NYC: Despite his parents’ considerable efforts to help and support him, Craig still becomes suicidal. Can you talk about the effect—or lack of effect—that family has on mental health?

Vizzini: It’s brave—and controversial—to talk about how the support of a family can fail to prevent someone from being suicidal. You can have the most loving family in the world, and still have a brain that convinces you that you don’t want to be around anymore. Ultimately, family can’t control or save a depressed person. What a family can do is simply exist—and that means a lot. The real thing you can do is simply be there. Make it clear that the depressed person can call you whenever they want, and check in on them.

NYC: Have you overcome depression?

Vizzini: Medically, depression is recognized as a chronic condition—it’s not something you are ever “cured” of. Can you believe it? What a pain! I am doing a lot better, though. Depression is nothing else if not negative behavior. So by being constantly aware of what it does to me—how it makes me stop eating, sweat, freak out, not get anything done, etc.—I’m better able to stay focused on not letting myself get there. I do still take medication, I don’t do therapy.

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