Another Antidote: Optimism By Fire

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 blind spots.

Laporte does it all romantically, with a distinctive, 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, obligations, and complex failings of mothers. Systemic erasure of people and groups is a pervasive theme of this collection, which pulses in tones of invisibility calling out to become visible.

As a fifth generation Californian on one side, and New York City descendant on the other, Laporte nearly weaponizes her being born in San Francisco as a regional tool in her writing and sociological explorations. She writes with the bravery of a life-long hypomanic temperament and the candor of a miraculously 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 procure these educational experiences - eventually, now, to the point of writing a 222 page, 2nd book.

Another Antidote: Optimism by Fire by APL holds writing about kind and loving extraterrestrials, time travel, enlightenment, physically fighting demons, housing as a basic human right, & much more. Also...... There are 11+ secret surprises throughout the book that will, hopefully, thrill any reader.