Lullabies for the Insomniacs: An Interview with Author Ella Grace Foutz
In Lullabies for the Insomniacs: A Memoir in Verse, Ella Grace Foutz weaves an intimate and gripping chronicle of her experience with mental illness. Amidst the turbulence of manic and depressive episodes, often accompanied by insomnia, she relentlessly pursues stability and self-understanding. Balancing poignancy with moments of levity, Foutz invites the reader along for her journey as she navigates the complex terrain of mental health to forge her path forward.
Today Ella Grace Foutz joins us to share her journey as a writer, the beginning stages of her memoir, and more.
What has been your journey as a writer?
For as long as I can remember, books have held a very special magic for me, and from the time I was a toddler, I had an ardent desire to create my own. I actually started writing before I could read. When I could just scrawl my alphabet, my mom would make me these little homemade books, and I would follow her around the house while she painstakingly spelled for me each word of the story I was writing. I have a clear memory of her making me memorize the spelling of “the”. As a kid I made dozens and dozens of these little books. Nothing was more enchanting to me than the concept of words on paper.
I started writing my first poetry in elementary school, but it wasn’t until high school that I realized how much poetry is my home medium. Even when I was little, what captivated me about words was the power to capture the deep substance of reality. I had a major growth spurt as an artist when in high school, my older sister suggested to me that I should start sharing my poetry on Instagram. Fluidly sharing my work, I had this realization that poetry didn’t have to be “good.” I stopped fixating on finesse and instead just spoke. I started to realize that good writing isn’t about some kind of mystical perfection, but about truth.
Though I’ve always longed to be a published author, there was of course lots of social pressure to pick a “real career” as I was exiting high school. I had myself and others convinced I was going to primarily pursue a career in political analysis or education or something. That summer however, I read Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion & Perseverance—a core-shaking thesis on how success is based on not arbitrary talent, but hard work. This book forced me to square up with the reality that I would never forgive myself if I did not give my honest all to this very important dream of mine, and believe that I could do it. About halfway through college, I made myself say it to people. When people asked the ubiquitous college kid question, “So what are you gonna do?”, I stopped sweeping my ambitions under the rug and told them confidently that I was going to be a writer. I think it’s neat that very quickly after that point is when I signed with my agent. I’m just a rookie here and in no position to give advice, but if I was, I would tell people you have to square up with your dreams. If you can’t witness your goal to yourself and others, you can’t actualize it.
How did Lullabies for the Insomniacs come into being?
The summer before my freshman year of college, I was lying awake at night in the midst of my first episode since being diagnosed a few months prior. It felt like the enormity of everything I’d been through and everything I’d learned was mounting against the tension of this space I was in. That night, I wrote the first and last poem in the book back-to-back. Organizing the manuscript would go on to be a process, but those two poems are still the first and the last.
After that episode, I had this visceral feeling that this was a book I needed to write. It was so crazy to me how long I had struggled without knowing what I had, and all because my experiences were so unrecognizable from the notions about bipolar disorder that I’d been handed. I couldn’t get over the thought that there are kids out there just like me, thinking like I did that they are stranded in an insanity that maybe has yet to be named, and I earnestly wanted to find those kids and tell them that this is what it is and they are not alone. This is a book for everyone, but at its core, it is still an intimate letter to those kids I have never met.
During the next year and a half, I worked on this book, thinking of it as my back-burner project while I procrastinated writing a different novel. But towards the last few months of finishing the first draft, I began to realize that this is my real heart story. Writing Lullabies was certainly a healing process for me. There are things I went through that for a long time I didn’t know how to think about. Memories of those experiences were like this long dark hallway in a far reach of the house that I tried to avoid at all costs. Now I know how to walk that hallway.
In your book, we pick up with you as a teenager, but you mention that your struggles with mental illness started at a much earlier age. Can you tell us a little about the early chapters of your mental health journey?
In many ways, I was a normal, happy, healthy kid. I feel like part of my hypomanic disposition is that I always have been someone with loads of energy and enthusiasm, and growing up, that is how most people knew me: bubbly ambitious Ella Foutz. But I was also always restless and anxious. In addition to having bipolar, I also have clinical OCD, and my OCD thought spirals stretch back from some of my earliest memories. They always stressed me out, but at some point around the fourth grade, they graduated from things that others found cute to a more visible distress. I was suddenly constantly missing school for what my mom always called “episodes”. For the rest of my time in school, I got used to receiving administrative letters saying that my attendance was getting dangerously low. I always kept my grades up though, so no one ever came after us about it.
What is it like being publicly open about having bipolar disorder?
For a long time, it was something that only my closest friends knew about me. It was an onerous secret to keep since it affects my life so much, especially as someone who believes deeply in telling the truth. When my episodes would hit, I was always having to make excuses about why I would be suddenly incapacitated, absent, able to show up for some things but not for others. At the end of a major episode back in 2023, I decided it was time to pull the curtain and I “came out” publicly on my Instagram. I think a lot of people coming from a variety of experiences can relate to getting to that point where being your authentic self without reservation becomes important enough to you that you’re willing to risk the judgement of others. There’s often a feeling of immense exposure and vulnerability, and it’s stressful to feel the fact that people aren’t always gonna understand. But in general, it’s very liberating to not be hiding this part of my life anymore.
What do you feel is the major thing you have to add to our ongoing discourse on mental illness?
As society has come to acknowledge the reality of mental illness, our culture’s attitude on mental health has taken a hard shift from “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, everyone has hard times and mental illness is just a lack of character” to in some circles, the opposite extreme: validation of the challenge to the point of yielding any power over the situation at all. I believe that the truth about mental illness is a median between these. The cause of mental illness is not a lack of grit, but, like with all real challenges, grit is a big part of the answer. Hope is always a choice. I’ve seen mental illness waved as a proof for the falsity of human autonomy. I’d like to contend through my story that the power we find in the face of mental illness serves as the surest proof of our autonomy that we have. The mental health movement is also at a frontier where though anxiety and depression have become normalized conversation topics, there is still often an air of social taboo around more obscure and often disabling disorders. We have a culture where most people express validation and support for mental illness at the same time that major studios pump out movies and shows where the basis of villainy is clinical insanity. While there seems to be a lot of acceptance for anxiety and depression, people’s understandings of mania and psychosis tend to be narrow and distorted. I hope to be a force for destigmatizing and humanizing a wider lens of people’s experiences.
Praise for Lullabies for the Insomniacs
“In this gritty memoir in verse, Foutz’s inner dialogue confirms humans are not one-size-fits-all and people shouldn’t be boxed in.”—Booklist
“Foutz conveys a tender embrace of her whole self in all its permutations. This perceptive collection offers insightful and, at times, uplifting revelations.”—Publishers Weekly‘
“Beautifully written in verse, this memoir shares the reality of living with these conditions. Written in verse, the story’s format softens the weight of a difficult subject, making it easier to process while still capturing the depth and emotion of the experience.”—School Library Journal
“The author is analytical at times, breaking down her symptoms as if identification and categorization will make them more manageable, but other poems come from a more primal place, the thoughts that come when life feels both precious and unendurable. . . Sometimes spare, even simple, and at other points sharply intelligent, the shifting language draws readers in, whether through the vulnerability of unadorned sentences laying emotional truths bare, or through the sparking of intellectual curiosity to slow down, ponder, and find meaning. . .”—The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
Connect with the Author
Ella Grace Foutz earned her bachelor of arts in liberal arts from Southern Virginia University and now resides in northern Ohio. Lullabies for the Insomniacs is her debut book.
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