S6-EP11: Sarah Fay on Healing Her Own Mental Illness and Applying Less and Less of More and More to Life and Substack

🎙️ This is Season 6 of my [B]OLD AGE podcast. I interview authors, experts, and exceptional individuals to reveal the truths about living [b]oldly as you move from midlife to old age. You can find over 100 previous episodes on Apple podcasts or on my website. - Debbie

In this episode, I talk with

Sarah Fay

about the parallels between her journey of recovery from serious mental illness and her work teaching Substack writers to think big (and get paid for it). I wanted to know if Sarah’s journey to mental health was connected to her success as a writer AND to her ability and desire to help other writers. The anwer is yes. In this conversation, we touch on emotional literacy, the prerequisites for healing from mental illness, how to deal with anxieties as writers, what Substack is and who it is for, and what Sarah loves most about helping other writers. - Debbie

Show Notes

Debbie talks with Sarah Fay | Less of More, a 52-year-old award-winning author, writing teacher, and mental health keynote speaker whose work has been featured on NPR, Oprah Daily, Forbes, TheLos Angeles Times, and more. Her journalistic memoir Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses (HarperCollins, 2022) was an Apple Best Books pick and was hailed inThe New York Timesas a “fiery manifesto of a memoir.” Her sequel, Cured: The Memoir, tells the story of Sarah’s full recovery from serious mental illness and how recovery is possible for everyone.

She writes for many publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and The Paris Review, where she was an advisory editor. Her essays have been chosen as a Notable Mention in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She’s the recipient of the Hopwood Award for Literature, as well as grants and fellowships from Yaddo, the Mellon Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. As a teacher, she’s on the faculty at Northwestern University and runs Writers at Work, a weekly publication with workshops to help creative writers produce their best work on Substack and get paid (very) well to do it. Her master plan is to make Substack the literary center of the universe. 

She lives in Chicago with her two beloved cats, who were instrumental in her recovery.

Mentioned in this episode or useful:

• Sarah Fay’s website

• Substack Writers at Work, Sarah’s weekly newsletter and community with workshops, a featured expert guide to Substack

• Sarah’s Less and Less of More and More, a Substack featured publication

• Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses by Sarah Fay (‎HarperOne, 2022)

• Cured: The Memoir by Sarah Fay, serialized on Substack in 2023

• Best Of: Diagnosing Mental Health and 'A Molecule Away from Madness' (NPR: April 10, 2022)

• Without a biological basis, how reliably can we diagnose and treat mental illness? (NPR: April 2, 2022)

• Thomas Insel, MD, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and author of Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health (Penguin Press, 2022) where he mentions the 3 Ps Sarah talks about on this episode.