Talking about mental suffering can be defined as producing a shameful, i.e., an embarrassing and painful, text. This essay aims to understand mental illness and recovery through the inside perspective offered by the Swedish playwright Gunilla Linn Persson in her autobiographic narrative poem, by taking a narrative approach to the text. In the form of a tale, Persson recaptures the story of her life. The suppressed stories of a dead child and an abandoned child assume symbolic meaning for three generations of women in her family. She also becomes aware of her own delusions such as staying in a false love relationship. However, the narrative stops being embarrassing and painful for several reasons, one of which being that her daughters specifically ask about it. The story was also tellable because it was composed in retrospect when Persson had recovered from a bipolar disease as well as from alcoholism.