Out of my Mind

Ten women labelled too fragile, too intense, too dangerous. A sharp essay on madness, power, and the narratives used to contain them.

Who gets to decide the state of a woman’s mind? And what happens when that judgment becomes her story?

Through the lives of ten women from different periods, backgrounds and geographies, Out of My Mind explores how social context, patriarchal oppression, violence and fame have shaped the way women are seen, judged, and remembered.

This is not a clinical treatise, a novel, or an academic essay. It is a literary and visual inquiry into the moment when a life becomes a diagnosis, a rumour, a myth or a warning. Natalie Wood, Sinéad O’Connor, Yayoi Kusama, Virginia Woolf, Agustina González, Carlota of Mexico, Mary Todd Lincoln, Simone Weil, Cheslie Kryst, Conce… Ten names, though there could have been many more.

With Violeta Gil’s intimate, politically alert prose and Ana Jarén’s colourful, delicate, and deeply contemporary illustrations, the book restores complexity to women too often reduced to spectacle, scandal, or symptom. What first appears as “madness” reveals itself as a much more unsettling web of pain, resistance, creativity, loneliness, power and control.

From a 21st-century perspective, and through the deeply human gaze of literature and art, Out of My Mind invites us to look again: at these women, at the stories told about them, and at the time in which we live.