They Get Your Highs (I Get Your Lows): A Story of Survival and New Hopes
Alcoholism. Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Bipolar Disorder. ADHD. Any one of these conditions is a challenge to forming and maintaining a healthy relationship with others. Anna Knight’s husband had all four. In her enlightening and harrowing memoir, They Get Your Highs (I Get Your Lows): A Story of Survival and New Hopes, Knight gives us a caretaker’s-eye view of her struggle to get her husband treatment while her marriage falls to bits during a long, difficult separation.
Culled from years of tracking events and incidents “just in case,” Knight has opened the closet door on a family ravaged by the unpredictability, emotional upheaval and self-sacrifice required in dealing with a loved one’s cluster of mental illnesses. There’s a lot to unpack, and Knight does so in a roughly chronological fashion that loops back on itself many times over, revealing new, ever more horrific details each time she does so.
THE COMPLEXITIES OF CARETAKING
In fact, Reading They Get Your Highs (I Get Your Lows) is a lot like peeling an onion. On the surface, her thoughts are organized and her tone measured. She educates us on the various disorders her ex-husband suffers from, giving us examples of how they manifested in his work, home and inner life. She gives us red flags to look out for — ones she naively overlooked or ignored on her journey. But as the memoir loops back upon events, more layers of detail and rawer emotions come to the surface, past and present collide, and the sting is sharp enough to draw tears to your eyes.
Knight struggles with her role as caretaker. The tension between what professionals advise her to do and what her family thinks is right creates rifts with her daughters, her in-laws and even her own parents. It doesn’t help that her in-laws are in utter denial of her husband’s issues. She is vilified, gaslit, blocked. She also shines a light on woefully inadequate medical and legal systems that fail the very people they were meant to help and protect. But she persists in trying to save a man who doesn’t want to be saved, and rearranging the remnants of a marriage that is doomed from the outset.
A TRANSFORMATION OF STRENGTHS
As second and third and fourth chances play out during her separation from her husband, a transformation begins to occur in Knight. Slowly and painfully her perspective shifts away from bearing the responsibilities she shouldered for 25 years. It takes as much strength to shift these burdens as it does to soldier along beneath them. Readers will cheer her on as she recenters her attention on herself and her daughters, and cry out in frustration when she backslides into her earlier states of repression and self-denial. The road, though winding, eventually leads her into the divorce courtroom.
It is here that she is prepared to tell her story, to set the record straight. To gain closure. But the judge never gives her the chance to do so. The divorce is granted, her husband’s illnesses go untreated, and she must now face the future as a single woman. It is a blessing that she is able to do so with all of the skills and lessons she’s gained along the way. And that’s where this book comes in.
Knight is finally able to tell that story, the one she’s gathered years of notes and evidence to be able to tell. But this book is more than a deposition. It’s a gift to others who may be going through similar experiences, an untangling of the emotional, moral and legal complexities of such a situation. It’s validation that says to such readers: “You are not alone. I believe your story. And there is a better ending you can write for it.”
Learn more about Knight on her BookTrib author profile page.
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