As society shifts towards talking more openly about mental illness, readers are hungry for answers and authenticity

Publishing trends reflect the age we are living in. It’s not just about the sort of stories people want to write, but the stories that people want to read.

In 1987, London advertising executive Peter Mayle took a second home in the south of France intending to spend a year writing his novel, A Year in Provence. Instead he sparked a mini-industry of blockbuster aspirational travel memoirs which lasted for two decades.

Suddenly the shelves were filled with books about leaving your dull corporate job behind and finding a new life, or love, in another country. Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French and Frances Mayes’ 1996 memoir Under the Tuscan Sun were publishing sensations.

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Of course from the current vantage point – a world of insecure work, in which each generation is poorer than the last – the desire to escape a boring, well-paid job seems a long way away. Who dreams of owning a second home when they can’t even own a first? But back then, in the prosperous, relatively stable 1990s, readers were dreaming of holiday homes, foreign-language classes and long trips away.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love marked a turning point: a depression memoir dressed as a travel book. Photograph: Rick Madonik/Getty Images

The year the mass-market travel memoir publishing trend reached its zenith – but also its crossover point to a new genre – was in 2006 with Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. The epic seller looked like a travel book about the author’s journeys to Rome, Ubud and India.

But it was also a depression memoir: how one woman survived her marriage breakdown and deep unhappiness. The exotic locations were window dressing for a more internal journey.

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Our appetite for the escape, for the aspirational, for the sunny, had been replaced by something darker and more real.

Fast-forward more than 10 years and the window dressing is gone. A new slew of books on anxiety and depression focuses on inner journeys to internal and dark locations, rather than trips to some executive’s charming belle époque in the south of France.

This week Vulture published a list of must-reads for August in the United States. It was heavy with opioid crisis-themed books. And in Australia this month, without me seeking them out, there’s an awful lot of anxiety-related books on my reading pile from emerging Australian authors.

We are definitely more open about talking about mental illness now than we have in the past Matt Haig

Jill Stark’s Happy Never After, Sam Twyford-Moore’s The Rapids and Rick Morton’s 100 Years of Dirt are all very different from one another, but each deal with mental illness. And all are excellent and illuminating reads.

Also on my reading stack is Matt Haig’s latest book on anxiety, Notes on a Nervous Planet (currently No 1 bestseller on the Times’ nonfiction list); Dr Steve Ellen and Catherine Deveny’s mental health “go-to guide”, Mental; Johann Hari’s book on depression and medication, Lost Connections; Bryony Gordon’s Mad Girl; and Sarah Wilson’s 2017 book on her own anxiety, First We Make the Beast Beautiful.

So what came first, the chicken or the egg? Did readers want more books about these darker, internal journeys, which drove the publishing trend – or is it being driven by the authors?

Catherine Milne, publisher at Harper Collins Australia, says the trend is “very much in response to what we’re currently seeing in Australia, which is a far greater willingness to have honest and open conversations about mental health issues in this country”.

“I don’t know if people are any more or less anxious than they used to be, but we’re certainly more open about it, which is only a good thing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Memoirs with a message ... books on mental health are flying off the shelves. Composite: MUP/Scribe/Black Inc

Lou Johnson, publishing director at Murdoch Books, agrees that “in publishing we are starting to see a trend of memoir with a message” and this includes “books around anxiety and depression. We will only see more. There’s a receptiveness to talking about mental health more openly”.

At Murdoch, Johnson has published a range of lifestyle books that “focus on living life well”, including Adventurous Spirit by Heather Hawkins and The Art of Living Alone and Loving It by Jane Mathews. They sit on the same pile as a slew of June releases that look at the other side of the mental health coin, with titles like The Happy Brain, The Happiness Curve and, for the cynophilists, Making Dogs Happy.

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Matt Haig’s sessions on anxiety were among the most attended at Byron Bay writers’ festival last weekend. He says that although anxiety has always been around, it’s exacerbated by the fast pace of the world and the distractions of technology and social media: “But we are definitely more open about talking about mental illness now than we have in the past,” he says.

Milne agrees that previously authors would have not been so open about their mental health issues.

“In September, I’m going to be publishing Osher Günsberg’s memoir, Back, After the Break, in which he’s incredibly honest, compellingly so, about his battle with weight issues, alcoholism, depression and in particular his struggle to come to terms with living with mental illness.

“In the not-too-distant past it might have been career suicide for someone like Osher to be so open about living with a mental illness, but there’s been such a societal shift over the last few years that he’s now seen as an outstanding role model and mental health advocate, which is so heartening.”

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