Spending most of her adolescence in Singapore, Lina is an angry, depressed young girl whose "false memories" cause her to nurture an irrational hatred of her family and most authoritative figures in her life. Though she is highly intelligent, Lina sabotages her education to spite her parents and is constantly rebelling against their concerns and advice for her life path. A talented writer and singer, Lina fluctuates between dreams of being a tattoo artist and being a famous actress or musician. In her states of delusion, Lina believes the only cause for her lack of success is the overbearing rules of her father, who is often away on business. In truth, Lina and her older sister, who also is sinking into depression, have little structure and guidance in their lives aside from him.
At times wrenching in its candidness—there are references to suicidal thoughts and rape— Lina's story is touching, heartbreaking, and moving, a stark exploration of mental illness, undiagnosed and unchecked. Readers will become immersed in Lina's reflections and come to understand what it is like for an individual and a family facing Borderline Personality Disorder.
Takeaway: Unflinching novel of growing up with borderline personality disorder.
Comparable Titles: Hilary Smith’s Welcome to the Jungle, Bassey Ikpi’s I'm Telling the Truth but I'm Lying.
Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
16 June 2023
Emo Reality by Jerold Daniels
Genre: Literary & General Fiction / Biographical
This biographical novel by Jerold Daniels details his daughter’s experiences with mental illness, using her personal journals as primary source material. Emo Reality follows Lina as a young woman living with increasing symptoms of mental illness, even though she doesn’t know it yet. As she progresses through her teen years, chaos and torment follow her and her family of father, mother, and sister.
Readers careen through the highs and lows of Lina’s mental illness. Her passions and rages are repeatedly intense, ever-changing, and debilitating for her and her family. She fails to gain professional intervention for her symptoms during her childhood and teen years, leaving her and her family vulnerable to the vicissitudes of her mental illness.
Her strong emotions color her perspective and her interactions at every turn. “My childhood memory began to be distorted and even creative when I reached my teens, as if it was determined to find reasons to blame others, especially my dad, for anything imperfect in my life.”
Lina struggles to cope and frequently engages in hateful behaviors with others, self-harm, and even suicidal ideation at times. The challenges of growing up overwhelm her due to her pervasive emotional dysregulation. We bear witness to the devastation that she and her family suffer connected to her untreated symptoms. Her story ultimately serves as a testament to the power of self-awareness, healing, and love.
Vivid and unapologetically blunt, this book offers an immersive experience of mental illness. We ride the waves of Lina’s super-charged emotions and mood shifts. It’s a stunning portrayal of severe borderline personality disorder. Jerold Daniels also sounds a powerful call for effective psychiatric treatment and mental health intervention.
Lina’s sister struggles with a less severe form of borderline personality disorder, and she provides an intriguing counterpoint to Lina’s perspective throughout the book. The relationship between Lina’s erratic, unstable mother and her scholarly yet frequently absent father offers additional insight into Lina’s upbringing. Periodic glimpses of wisdom emerge in Lina’s understanding of her experiences, especially as the novel progresses.
Occasionally brutal to read, it contains hateful and graphic language, details about sexual and physical abuse, vivid descriptions of self-harm, and graphic details about suicidal behavior.
Emo Reality is a candid portrayal of untreated mental illness and a poignant story of survival and transformation. It’s an impactful read for anyone, but especially those looking to validate the struggles of mental illness and borderline personality disorder.
Reviewed by Lisa Parker Hayreh
Content Warnings: mental illness, sexual and physical abuse, self-harm, suicidal ideations The powerful account of a young woman’s descent into untreated mental illness
9 June 2023
Emo Reality: The Biography of Teenage Borderline Personality Disorder
by Jerold Daniels
Singapress
Shadows Play Out in My Mind...
Lina's childhood life was filled with traveling and enjoying a luxurious lifestyle. Her privileged life changed when she entered into her teenage years.
As a teenager, her mind takes over her carefree existence. She finds herself plagued by multiple personality disorders. Her mental illness threatens to destroy her and hurts those that she loves.
Will Lina be able to defeat the demons that are trying to rob her of a happy life? Or will they take her down a dark pathway where she is powerless to return?
Emo Reality: The Biography of Teenage Borderline Personality Disorder gives a first-hand look at how mental illness has the power to destroy a happy life. It's filled with the intense emotional distress of one person's inner struggle battling unknown demons.
Jerold Daniels has written a powerful novel that will have the reader stop and reflect on how severe mental issues are to an individual. It provides an up-close look at one person's struggles to overcome being taken over by her delusions. It's written with such intense emotion the reader feels the jagged scars the main character has suffered. This book is one that made a dramatic impact on this reader.
Book Review by Suzie Housley
234 Pages
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C5QXG9GV
20 September 2023
Emo Reality: The Biography of Teenage Borderline Personality Disorder
by Jerold Daniels
Singapress
At 14, Lina Daniels feels like her life is starting to crash and burn at rapid speed. Tasks that were once easy to do become impossible to complete; one minute she's on a high, the next, she's having a full-blown meltdown. And soon, Lina's education starts taking a drastic downward dive. Worse still, her erratic behavior is starting to affect the family. Everyone is convinced Lina's just looking for attention. But what they all fail to realize is that Lina suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder; a disorder that not only cripples the mind but devastates the life of both the sufferer and his/her loved ones. By writing Emo Reality, Jerold, Lina's father, hopes to draw more attention to the disorder and the havoc it can wreak if not diagnosed at an early age. Jerold hopes to prevent this from becoming someone else's reality.
Jerold writes Emo Reality from Lina's perspective which gives us a clear view of what Lina's thoughts were at the time of her mental crisis. Her thoughts were that of an aggressive and dangerous person and at times I felt frustrated that no one could see that she was in pain and help her the way she needed to be helped. The last chapter is insightful and succeeds in what it had hoped to do: to help others gain insightful knowledge concerning Borderline Personality Disorder and how to properly deal with it. Through Lina, Jerold takes us on a heartfelt journey of what can happen when mental disorders go untreated and what the outcome is. Emo Reality is a beautiful memoir filled with a father's love and his refusal to give up on his daughter.
5 Stars
— Reviewed by Danelle Petersen
12 May 2023
Emo Reality: The Biography of Teenage Borderline Personality Disorder
by Jerold Daniels
Singapress
"Encouraging voyeurism into my personal life had led me to exaggerate my problems instead of solving them."
The daughter of a wealthy father whose work takes the family around the world, Lina recalls her preteen years playing violin and enjoying school in America, Europe, and India. During middle and high school in Singapore, however, she begins to become unstable. She experiences nightmares and voices. She doesn’t do homework and fights with friends and family. Regardless of her father's efforts to hold the family together, her parents get a divorce as a result of her mother's infidelity. Depressed, Lina cuts herself, wears black, and expresses her dark moods on social media. She moves to America after high school to pursue her goal of being an independent artist. Planning a move to London, she remains in America, practicing tattoo art and then selling her YouTube videos while sharing an apartment with an abusive bouncer. Eventually moving to London, she and a supportive partner help each other heal from their pasts.
Solutions to lifelong struggles are found with a diagnosis in this poignant book. Lina’s raw emotions are described in verbatim conversations, memories, and songs, showing a girl in crisis while her parents press her on schoolwork and a future she resists. Author Daniels clearly depicts the ways wealth and scholastic success can cause pressure and strain. For example, private school expectations and comparisons to classmates stress Lina, while her parents blame her for underachieving. In response, she looks online for validation and connection.
Daniels next shows how, with the help of her partner and a therapist’s diagnosis of borderline personality in her twenties, Lina tracks false memories over time. The result is the ability to change her behavior, starting with amending her online presence and developing a persona she and others like. The setting then broadens from an exclusively internal landscape at the start, projected onto the internet, to include scenes of her physical, life-affirming relationships in her London apartment at the end. This happy, fulfilled conclusion satisfies readers after such a dire story.
Book review by Mari Carlson
