A stint in London’s Priory did not solve her problems. She entered a succession of damaging relationships and would go through manic phases where she worked all night and slept all day.

What emerges is an unflinchingly honest account of Emma’s psychiatric problems - she would sit up at night and pray to die when she was 12, began self-harming at aged 16 and became bulimic when she moved to New York aged 20. In this memoir, Emma uses Dr R’s death as a springboard to write about the way in which this cheerfully optimistic and deeply supportive therapist helped her on the road to recovery after her failed suicide attempt in early 2000. She only discovered he had died two weeks after the fact when she rang his office and got the answer machine.

In Emma’s case her psychiatrist, Dr R, died quite unexpectedly of lung cancer in 2008. If anything the memoir is about grief and what it is like when a patient loses their trusted and much relied upon shrink. (To be honest, until I started reading this book, I didn’t even know who Emma Forrest was - turns out she had a rather meteoric rise as a teenage music journalist, before penning her first novel aged 21 she’s now a screenwriter based in Los Angeles.) But to dismiss this memoir as a kiss-and-tell about Colin Farrell would be wrong. Perhaps I’m the only person on the planet that, up until a few days ago, did not know that Colin Farell and Emma Forrest were once an item. Suddenly, it all clicked and fell into place. I was so intrigued by their romance and then the outfall of their break up that I couldn’t resist Googling to see who GH really was. He’s not named in the book and is referred to as GH (which stands for Gypsy Husband) and sounds quite lovely and interesting, albeit a little flakey. What I didn’t know was that much of the book revolves around a relationship that Emma had with a Hollywood movie star that ends rather abruptly and leaves her feeling bereft. When I first requested Emma Forrest’s Your Voice in My Head it was on the basis that it sounded like an interesting memoir, a kind of modern day Bell Jar, about an English-born writer who tried to commit suicide in New York and the psychiatrist who saved her. Non-fiction – paperback Bloomsbury 224 pages 2012.

Your voice in my head book