Fairness—or rather, the lack of it—has always been a huge emotional trigger for me. Was it fair that I was born with a serious mental illness, i.e. bipolar disorder? On bad days I say, hell no it was not, and shake my fist at the gods. On good days, I’m not so angry. I realize that to be completely fair, I was also born with a lot of advantages: white middle-class privilege, for starters. Follow that up with a Seven Sisters education and a law degree, and life looked like an easy glide from there.

Except.

Except there’s that niggling matter of the mental illness. At my most symptomatic, I was a different person, capable of conduct that shocked me when I recovered—assuming I could remember what I did. At the height of mania, my memory would evaporate and I’d have to sort through evidence of my misbehavior afterward to piece together what I’d done: towering stacks of receipts from ill-advised purchases, like plane trips to faraway dream destinations; papers, papers everywhere—the........

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