A memoir about anxiety, our minds, and optimism in spite of it all
Where do mental illness stories begin?

Anna's always had too many feelings. Or not enough feelings – she's never been quite sure. Debilitating panic. Extraordinary melancholy. Paranoia. Ambivalence. Fear. Despair.

From anxious child to terrified parent, mental illness has been a constant. A harsh critic in the big moments – teenage pregnancy, divorce, a dream career, falling in love – and a companion in the small ones – getting to the supermarket, feeding all her cats, remembering which child is which.

But between therapists' rooms and emergency departments, there's been a feeling even harder to explain ... optimism.

In this sharp-eyed and illuminating memoir, award-winning writer Anna Spargo-Ryan pieces together the relationships between time, mental illness, and our brain as the keeper of our stories. Against the backdrop of her own experience, she interrogates reality, how it can be fractured, and why it's so hard to put it back together.

Powerfully honest, tender and often funny, A Kind of Magic blends meticulous research with vivid snapshots of the stuff that breaks us, and the magic of finding ourselves again.
PRAISE for A Kind of Magic
'The magic in this necessary and beautiful book is how deftly Spargo-Ryan shines her light on life's dark materials to offer comfort and inspiration to the rest of us. A must read.' – Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner and The Believer
'Anna Spargo-Ryan writes with the kind of searing insight and beauty that both shatters your soul and also pieces it back together. I hope she never stops.' – Clementine Ford, author of Fight Like A Girl and How We Love
'No one's writing like Anna Spargo-Ryan right now. With the grace, calm and reassuring grip of your best friend's hand, she leads you through exactly what it feels like for your mind to unravel, heart to explode and life to fall apart. Then, reassuringly, she leads you through what's happening, tells you what it means and even makes you laugh. And you come out feeling like for all the pain, a good life is still within reach.' – Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law and Gaysia

'A Kind of Magic is one of the most accurate, insightful and honestly rendered depictions of mental illness I've read. Anna writes with warmth, humour, unvarnished truth and courage about her darkest moments and the many ways in which her brain has lied to her over the years.' – Jill Stark, author of High Sobriety and Happy Never After
'so open-hearted, so generous and so funny that in its darkest moments – and there are many – you will find yourself enraged by the medical industry that failed her, and by those who didn't help. An eternal optimist and a gorgeous writer, Spargo-Ryan proves that no matter how much stigma surrounds an illness – and how ferociously that illness might mess with your memory, identity, life – you still have agency and a narrative that deserves respect.' – The Guardian
'It's still quite something to read a book that speaks the truth about mental health. A Kind of Magic is Anna Spargo-Ryan's epic, relentlessly honest autobiography of a life lived under the many umbrellas of mental illness. It is a wonderful, wide-ranging feat ... This is the way to write it: as it really is. There is hope at the end of this book, but thank god it's the sort of hope we actually need: the hope, slowly emerging in mainstream society, that...