MEMOIR

Growing up, Anna Wharton was frightened of her grandmother. She was the archetypal ‘madwoman in the attic’: confined to a corner, speaking gibberish, who, according to family lore, had once been committed to an asylum. Anna could never understand the gentle care and devotion her own mother bestowed on a woman who seemed unable to love her back.

Many years after her death, Anna sets out to uncover the truth of her grandmother’s madness, and how it defined the women who came next. She travels to the old Victorian asylums, pores over records and family photographs, and turns to the classics of literature – from The Bell Jar to The Ha-Ha and Girl, Interrupted – to fill in the gaps.

I Made You Up Inside My Head is Anna’s mission to make sense of how women like her grandmother were treated inside the institutions that promised to make them well. At once blazing and tender, it is a daughter’s careful excavation of a painful inheritance – and her fearless attempt to re-examine the stories that shape us.

I Made You Up Inside My Head – On Mothers and Madwomen will be published in February 2027. You can pre-order it here.