Melissa Bond: On Motherhood, Addiction, the Love that Carries Us Through and Her Memoir, "Blood Orange Night"

Melissa Bond’s harrowing book, Blood Orange Night, is so close to my own heart – a new mother struggling with a descent into a sleepless vortex where she finds herself slowly detaching from reality, all while trying to raise her baby and preserve her family. It’s difficult and painful and such a necessary story to share as we find these struggles that new mothers face are so much more common than we think. With each story bravely shared with the world, new mothers have a hand to reach for in the darkness, to feel like they are heard, that they aren’t alone.

Blood Orange Night explores addiction, mental illness, motherhood and ultimately the love that carries us through. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Melissa over Zoom about her journey through writing this deeply personal and necessary memoir. 

Barrie Miskin: When did you realize that you were ready to share your story?

Melissa Bond: I think as a writer, anything that happens, it goes onto the page. It's part of processing what's happening. It's part of trying to create meaning out of what's happening. 

As a new mother, I had insomnia and was prescribed benzodiazepines. And when I became dependent on benzodiazepines and experienced my eventual horrific withdrawal, I thought, this is something that actually is not talked about to the degree that it should be, this is something that I absolutely have to get out.

We are just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of our understanding and awareness of the severity of the impact and the widespread benzodiazepine epidemic. It's the last thing I want to write about, but I have to do it because I don't want anyone else to suffer the way I did.

BM: How much distance do you feel like you needed from the whole experience in order to sit down and write Blood Orange and Night? 

MB: I love that question because it really is hard to know. I separated from my then husband in 2014, which was when I was just starting to get stable. I was still on really wobbly legs, and it takes years and years to heal because they now have evidence that there is brain damage that you can sustain from benzodiazepine addiction, that can be permanent. I didn't know if my neurological damage was going to be permanent.

I started writing Blood Orange Night in 2015. It took several years of writing. I think with each draft, I got more distance, more perspective, more insight. The first draft was just like, a vomitorium (laughs). It was like 450 pages and it was everything that had happened. It was all of the, anguish and then the crafting, and then the maturity, and then the perspective starts to kind of come in and that molds it into a book. 

BM: How do you hold space for yourself? I feel like with a book as personal and harrowing as Blood Orange Night, people are probably asking you for so much advice and needing so much from you. How do you protect yourself from not getting retraumatized?

MB: I think that's a beautiful and kind question because it really, when you have a trauma, there is that sort of balance of, is there something that I'm going to get triggered by? And at the same time, I'm so deeply moved by anyone that is going through it that all I want to do is to offer support and help. So, I think it's a constant kind of balancing act and a constant checking in of how am I feeling? Is what I can offer genuine? Is it open? Do I need to take care of myself first? And so far, I think I've been pretty good.

I had one time where someone had reached out to me, and I was so upset and so angry because his psychiatrist was not letting him withdraw from the medications in a timeframe that suited him and his body, which is absolutely recommended with benzodiazepines, and it was causing him greater harm. So, I saw the medical establishment coming in and him not feeling as though he had any options. And I felt myself getting triggered. 

I know enough now to know that I need to take space to process because it doesn't help to be angry at the global medical establishment. It is my job is to educate and to support as much as I can. I come back to the humanity and remember that even the medical provider are doing their best. Sometimes they're not educated, sometimes they are at fault for being negligent. And at the same time, humanity and compassion are the places that I land first.

BM: I know you had two young children while you were writing Blood Orange Night. How did your routine look during this, this time in order to kind of craft a book?

MB:  It was a very lucky situation because I had run a Kickstarter and I'd made enough to give me space to write the first draft. That said, I was living on a very shoestring budget.

Because I had the Kickstarter, I was also doing part-time work, and then I was, you know, being a mom. I would get up, I would get them to school, I would write for four or five hours, I would do whatever other kind of work I could, and then I would pick them up. So that felt very lucky. That's not always the circumstance. 

And then I got a full-time job because the money ran out and I was like, oh, okay, now I've got to edit it. That took three years (laughs).

BM: The editing is so long!

MB: The editing is just this slow carving away and carving away. What that looked like as a mom with a child with a disability was getting up at 4:30 or 5 am and getting in a little chunk of writing time. The weekends when my children are with their dad, I can get in 15 hours. I basically worked every moment I could.

BM: That’s a lot.

MB: It was, you know, but it’s an act of love. I just couldn't not do it. I would still try to take care of myself and have social engagements, but I had to be a very good time management person.

BM: I also know that you're a prolific poet and narrative journalist. How did your work as a poet journalist inform this process for you?

MB:  Oh, I love this question because this was the central question for me as I went into the book. There's a lot of information there. There's a lot of medical information, and I want to be reliable but I'm not a scientific reporter, I'm not a medical professional. However, I'm going to be giving some information that's new. The journalist in me wanted to drill down and get enough of that information that people felt like they had some grounding, but the poet in me was the one that was like, where's the beauty? Like, how did I survive? That's where the beauty came in, because I knew I had to make something so difficult and painful also beautiful.

BM: What advice do you have for kind of aspiring writers and what advice did you hold onto throughout your process? 

MB: This really wild transformation happened internally when I went through this extremely difficult process. Somehow my lack of belief in myself that had always kept me from trying, from really, really going all the way got burned out of me during the whole benzo withdrawal. And I had such belief in this book. I think that you really have to adore what you're doing and check in with yourself about why you're doing it. For me it was about creating something beautiful and then to go for it. Go all the way, don't hold yourself back. The minute I unleashed myself, that was the minute things took off.

Melissa Bond blogged and became a regular contributor for Mad in America in the years of her dependence on benzodiazepines. ABC World News Tonight interviewed her for a piece in January 2014, and Blood Orange Night was selected by both The New York Times and Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books as one of the Best Audiobooks of 2022. Bond is a respected speaker and writer on the perils of over-prescribing benzodiazepines and has been featured on podcasts, like The New York TimesBook Review, Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books, Courageously.U, and Endeavors Radio. Her TEDxSaltLakeCity talk was released in October 2022.