‘I had a really crippling break’: how author Michael Thomas lost 20 years to mania, depression and more | Autobiography and memoir

It should be some kind of happy ending when, after years of poverty and graft, an aspiring writer publishes their debut novel and it is greeted with acclaim and awards – but that’s not how it happened for Michael Thomas. His 2006 novel Man Gone Down seemed to augur the arrival of a powerful new literary voice, the beginning of a brilliant career. He featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, he won the €100,000 Dublin literary award – one of the most generous prizes in the book world – and he was promoted to assistant professor at Hunter College, New York, where he taught creative writing. But a follow-up would not arrive until now, 20 years later. Thomas’s new memoir, The Broken King, goes some way to explaining what happened in between. It also confirms his formidable talent.

The Broken King is an extraordinary read – deeply personal and intimate, but also expansive and free-ranging, taking in everything from TS Eliot (the title comes from Eliot’s poem Little Gidding) to James Baldwin, Brazilian football and the Rolling Stones. Thomas’s story runs through what he describes as a “perfect storm of conditions”: poverty, parental abandonment, racism, alcoholism, sexual violence, self-sabotage and mental illness. It would be tempting to classify it as some kind of misery memoir, but it is neither bleak nor generic – Thomas is simply too good a writer for that. Reviews in the US have been glowing: “Thomas has rendered beautifully an excruciating existence from which it is impossible to turn away,” raved the author Thomas Chatterton Williams in the New York Times.

Thomas did not “enjoy” literary success first time round. In fact, it contributed to his breakdown. Receiving the Dublin literary award did not make him think, “I am a great author,” he tells me via video call. His reaction was more relief that he could pay off some of his debts: “We were two months behind on our mortgage.” Nor did he revel in the attention: “When I started getting critical acclaim and showing up on the cover of things, I couldn’t feel it. And I kept trying to tell people that I couldn’t feel it, and they thought it was being smug or humble. I was really in a year-long descent.”

He’s sitting in his office at Hunter College. Behind him are books, artefacts, an acoustic guitar and a commanding view over Manhattan. “It’s in a state of construction. I’m making a floating birch wall over here,” he apologises, pointing off-camera. He speaks gently, with a musical lilt, and he looks much younger than his 58 years – partly because he’s as athletic as he is artistic. He enjoys exercise and physical labour, such as house-building and carpentry, as much as he does teaching and writing. To him, there’s nothing contradictory about “thinking of the poetry I want to write while doing an intense set of deadlifts”.

In late 2007, less than a year after Man Gone Down was published, Thomas was planning his next step. “I had a proposal, six pages, and it was neat and clean and tidy. I gave it to my editor; I had a meeting with the publisher. They said: ‘Great, go off and do your thing.’ I was glib about it, like: ‘Yeah, I’ll knock this out in six months to a year. I can write about mental illness’ – not mine.” He pauses to laugh at the irony. “My father’s, and my brother’s. And then I had a break, a really crippling break.”

Promoting his book, travelling, doing talks; trying to write, teach, read, parent; procrastinating, not sleeping well, drinking too much coffee, he became what he now characterises as “short-cycling manic depressive”. “I would have an ‘illumination’ for two hours, and then I wouldn’t have time to record it and I’d tumble into a depressive state. And I could have multiple states within a few days, and so the brilliant idea would become mundane or esoteric or fragmented, almost as though I was getting a narrative from a stranger.”

Events came to a head when he was alone in Kansas City on his book tour, “seeing dragons and demons and all kinds of things”. Waiting to board a flight home, he had a breakdown at the airport. “I knew I was insane,” he writes. When his wife takes him to a psychiatric hospital back in New York, he tells the doctor: “It’s a curious thing, the phrase ‘out of your mind’ … My trouble now is that I’m in a way, in part, deep in it. More than I’ve ever been. It’s not a good environment, doctor.”

As with the rest of the book, Thomas catalogues these events and experiences in uncanny, almost photographic detail, but the narrative also pans out across his memories and anxieties, and his vast cultural hinterland. He almost apologises for The Broken King’s expansiveness: “Part of it was realising how personal it was going to be, and trying to make it more intricate to really distance myself from the work.”

Man Gone Down was a loosely fictionalised account of a small section of Thomas’s life, when he was in his 30s, desperately trying to keep his head above water, financially and psychically, and hold on to his marriage and his three young children. The Broken King expands on that narrative considerably, particularly Thomas’s male relationships: with his father (who abandoned the family when Thomas was eight, struggled with depression, drank heavily, and at times lived in his car); his older brother (who steals from his family and others, and is in and out of prison); and his two sons (he also has a daughter), whom he worries are destined to extend the lineage of troubled men.

There’s a moment halfway through the book when the penny almost drops: an occupational therapist diagnoses his second son, Miles, with a “non-specific cognitive disorder”, and even suggests: “Like father, like son.” That took him by “complete surprise”, Thomas says, but he did not act on it until much later. Until that point he had attributed his difficulties in life to all manner of factors – “race, class, artistic temperament, and just so many other things. Models from books and films and music, and just this kind of alienation and estrangement … but no, not neurodivergence.” As a child he was diagnosed with dyslexia, ADHD and other conditions, but it wasn’t until adulthood that it was defined as level 1 autism. As such, The Broken King is, among other things, a chronicle of neurodivergence from the inside. “I hope this doesn’t seem insensitive: the book is autistic,” Thomas says. “It’s really just a study of someone with level-one autism trying to tell a story.”

Thomas’s story raises all kinds of questions about the relationship between neurodivergence and artistic talent, not to mention nature and nurture. How to square his diagnosis with other traumatic elements of his upbringing: the poverty, the alcoholism, the abandonment? Racism also plays a part. His great-grandfather was born enslaved, in Virginia, he tells me. He remembers his great-grandmother when he was a child – a living connection to that time. He shows me a photograph of his mother in Virginia, in 1951. She is looking at a burnt cross that was put up outside her high school. She migrated north to Boston, where she met his father, but largely raised him and his two older siblings singlehandedly. “We grew up in public housing with a single mom believing education was the great equaliser, and she just busted her ass.”

As a kid Thomas struggled to fit in, socially as well as racially (he also has Irish and Native American ancestry). “I could read at an early age and could do my brother’s homework, but I couldn’t tie my shoes.” He connected with Black role models – Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Frederick Douglass – but he also loved the Beatles and Bob Dylan and Greek mythology. “I was called an Oreo [Black on the outside, white on the inside, like the cookie], or a ‘honky nigger’ or ‘not really Black’.”

At the same time, Thomas writes, “white people were dangerous because they were extreme. They tried to either aid or block my passage into their segregated world. Benevolent whites didn’t think I was Black. Whatever native intelligence I possessed had nothing to do with my race. Blackness was something they were helping me overcome.” Meanwhile, he was “subject to most of the chronic and systemic, acute and arbitrary violence the republic or the individual believed I deserved”.

Thomas’s marriage to a relatively wealthy white woman complicates matters further, in terms of both fitting in with his white in-laws and raising mixed-race children. Their experience of the world will certainly be different from his, he says. “Just as my mother didn’t want her experience to be mine, I don’t want the things that happened to me to happen to my kids. I’m not worried about them ‘losing their Blackness’, though. They get to define who they are.” All of Black culture is theirs, he says, as is all of every other culture – as it was for him, as it should be for everyone.

There is another challenging, complicating element to Thomas’s story: early on in the book he discloses that he was raped when he was seven years old. He doesn’t go into detail about the incident – except to say it happened when he was at a day camp in Boston. He didn’t tell anyone at the time; in fact, he strove to hide the incident from his parents, even burning his clothes afterwards. “I knew my pain would kill them,” he writes. He is open about how the incident warped his life. “Growing into a young man I was distant, wayward, wild, drunk. I could be cruel. I’d lie to everyone I knew.” He struggled with self-harm, alcoholism, depression, physical and emotional intimacy – “I lived in a perpetual post-trauma.” He told his future wife in his 20s after he was re-traumatised reading a passage about rape in a Baldwin novel. As soon as he finished reading it he went into a fever, was trapped in his apartment for days hallucinating, and was eventually hospitalised with pneumonia. As soon as he recovered, a dinner party conversation about sex caused him to shut down and not speak for three days.

In this context, I hesitate to even bring the incident up. Thomas is comfortable talking about it right now, he says, but when he has told friends about it, he has often regretted it.

“It didn’t bring any clarity to me and it hurt them,” he explains. “Like it was giving them too much to deal with. And watching people over the years or just over the weeks, wondering how to be with me and be with that information, they had to treat me differently.” These things can become a lens through which to judge others’ actions and behaviours, he suggests. You could say the same of race, or neurodivergence, or gender, or any number of factors.

I was feeling apprehensive about interviewing Thomas, I tell him, given how honestly and openly he has written about his life. He felt the same, he admits, having not been in the public eye for decades, though he has been relaxed and talkative throughout our 90-minute conversation, which digresses at times into chat about sports teams or our favourite Beatles albums. Is there a worry, though, given how his last experience of literary success contributed to his breakdown, that the same thing could happen this time around?

He seems less worried about it. A lot has happened in the intervening two decades. He got divorced in 2014, which inevitably affected his children. His mother died from Covid in 2020 (his next book will be about her life, he says). His eldest son, Alex, is now 30, and a social worker. His other son, Miles, is 27 and handling his own neurodivergence very differently from how Thomas did. “He doesn’t have as much invested in controlling the conventional world. He’s not angry.” Thomas also has an eight-year-old son with a new partner. He has no idea how he has been as a father, he says: “Sometimes I think I intensified some of the suffering … sometimes I feel like I gave them a lot … sometimes I just think I became my father with privilege and safety nets. Without growing up privilege-adjacent, and then having literary and academic success and a tenured position, and people saving my bacon over the years, I could be living in my car right now.”

In general, at present, it feels as if he has found some stability. “I’m trying to figure it out through Bowie right now,” he says, jokingly, quoting lines from Changes: “‘I turned myself to face me, but I never caught a glimpse …’ I’m becoming acutely aware of my strangeness, but not self-conscious about it, or apologetic or aggressive.”

Is that liberating? “It calms some of the noise,” he replies. “This might sound cheesy: I don’t know if I’m OK with myself, but I think I’m starting to accept myself. I’m also about to turn 59, so I don’t have that younger man’s piss and vinegar. I think I’m a little more reflective and less impulsive. I don’t have the anger I used to have. I don’t have the fear I used to have – at least in this moment. I know it can come again. I feel incredibly lucid. There’s been a lot of loss in the last decade, so … today I feel OK.”