“A Vulnerability Artist Who Fights Ableism”: Dr. Merri Lisa Johnson on BPD

What does writing from the frontline of BPD look like? If the author is borderline up-ender Dr. Lisa Johnson, it looks and sounds like a witty, raw, and dazzling conflagration. In this interview, she and I discuss her memoir, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality, and share our experiences of navigating academia while being open about our BPD diagnoses.

Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet

Merri Lisa Johnson, “Neuroqueer Feminism: Turning with Tenderness toward Borderline Personality Disorder”

Courtney Cook, The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces

bell hooks, All About Love and other books

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Marsha Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living

Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"

Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House

José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics

Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

Kiera van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation