Not What The Good Fairy Promised

Twenty-four-year-old Joanna’s life flipped upside down at the taking of a phone call. News of her sister’s near-death in a fire triggered the onset of bipolar disorder, a mental health condition that Joanna would have to manage for the rest of her life.

A scholarship to Cambridge, with three years to get her degree, had ended in this. Joanna’s high hopes, and her father’s fierce ambitions for her, now lay in tatters. A glowing future of any description lay beyond her grasp as she struggled to get to grips with her new and utterly foreign reality. Where was she going in life now?

Not What the Good Fairy Promised is the heart-warming story of a young woman’s experience of terrifying breakdown, psychiatric hospital, and the stigma of mental illness. There is the battle with everyday life, with its frightening demand that she re-discover her identity – her selfhood – while struggling to survive and earn a living, yearning for something worthwhile to fill the hours of nine to five. This is a tale of experiencing, and overcoming, serious mental illness, of driving ahead to forge a new and unlooked for future – and what the Good Fairy did deliver.

At 18, the author was thrilled to win an Open Scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge. If you look up the records of Girton College alumnae, you will not find Joanna, as this is a pen name. Joanna emerged from Cambridge with high hopes for a career. Her book is the story of her experience, following university, of the serious mental health condition, Bipolar Affective Disorder. Joanna Petersfield will keep the details of her life thereafter hidden for the moment, so as not to spoil her readers’ enjoyment of learning how she dealt with this seeming disaster!