Another Antidote: Optimism By Fire: Optimism By Fire

Your life will change for the better after reading this book. Another Antidote: Optimism by Fire is the second book, and first full length collection of Abby Peyton Laporte. This large, 14-pt font, hardcover book was released on May 31st of 2025, and opens topics ranging from psychotic bipolar, to periodic homeless, resilience, love, anti-capitalist writings, embodiment, American identity, privilege, race, and gender. In her full-length, multi-genre work, APL writes with fierceness and bravery about surviving partnered violence, nervous system healing, and chronic injuries and pain. She dissects obsessive compulsive disorder, and the extreme lack of psychotic-featured representation, while repeatedly calling out her own unearned advantages, complexities and flaws, and ever-slippery blindspots. Laporte does it all romantically, with a spaciously-formatted poetic lens. In this paradoxically relaxing combination of essays, poetry, and sci-fi prose, Abby dedicates pages upon pages to her ancestors, seen and unseen, and the burden of lost American identities in a repressive social system, as well as the roles, complex failings, and obligations of mothers. Systemic erasure of people and groups is a pervasive theme of this collection, which calls the invisible to become visible. As a fifth generation Californian on one side, and New York City descendant on the other, Laporte weaponizes her being born in San Francisco as a specific regional tool in her writing and sociological explorations. She writes with the bravery of a life-long hypomanic temperament and the candor of socially-comfortable and extroverted human being with, consistently, nothing left to lose. Abby Peyton Laporte has an undergraduate degree in Interdisciplinary Biology & Humanities, with a Latin American Studies emphasis, and a graduate degree (MFA) in Narrative Medicine writing. She has studied public health, nutrition, ecology, and microbiology, which is reflected in her work. Abby Laporte survived brain damage from the depth of the psychotic episodes at 19 and 21 years old, and yet went on to recover and then complete her education. Now, to the point of writing a 222 page book. Another Antidote: Optimism by Fire by APL includes writing of kind and loving extraterrestrials, time travel, enlightenment, physically fighting demons, housing as a basic human right, & much more. (There are 11+ secret, extra-special, multi-media surprises throughout the book that might thrill any reader.)