March 24, 2026
Never Been Better, by Leanne Toshiko Simpson
Finally, finally, I got my hands on Never Been Better, by Leanne Toshiko Simpson, a book that I’ve been really looking forward to since my friend Chantel Guertin awarded it the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Romance and couldn’t stop raving about it. I’ve become an admirer of Simpson’s advocacy for people living with mental health struggles and the way she shares her own experiences with bipolar, and so I’ve been looking forward to finding out how she considers these ideas via fiction in her debut novel, billed as My Best Friend’s Wedding, except the plot starts in the psych ward.
Our narrator is Dee, whose mental health troubles continue and whose life is held together by desperation, chewing gum, and the valiant efforts of her audacious sister Tilley—and I appreciate that in a novel about three psychiatric patients, the most deranged character of neither of these, but Tilley instead, who insists on joining Dee as the plus-one for her friends’ Matt and Misa’s destination wedding in Turks and Caikos, mostly because Dee’s intent on revealing her true feelings for Matt before the ceremony, and Tilley’s determined to save her sister from herself, whatever that entails (and also partake in the amentities of an all-inclusive)
It’s complicated, because Dee, Matt and Misa all met as psychiatric patients, but now that part of their story is written out as Misa presents a picture-perfect image of her relationship to her Japanese-Canadian family who have no idea that she lives with mental illness—they think she’s just an extra-dedicated hospital volunteer. That she cannot be honest about where her and Matt’s story began only underlines Dee’s certainty that Matt’s chosen the wrong person, and that breaking up the couple is the honourable thing to do.
What happens next is messy, twisty, human, and real, replete with hilarity (the line about Dee’s meds giving her the libido of a ham sandwich!) and also real heart. While I had my doubts, because this plot seems like it’s heading for a shipwreck, the resolution is rich and meaningful, a meditation on ever after (in mental sickness and mental health) and what being “better” really means.
