It’s hard to find much solace within the relentless gloom—however insightfully explored—of one writer’s depression.
A writer reflects on her unceasing struggle with clinical depression.
Although Merkin (The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags, 2014, etc.) is an undeniably talented writer, this memoir of her depression is as tough to read as it must have been to write. This is “the book about depression that I had been contacted to write by three successive publishing houses over the course of more than a decade,” and the author admits that “my daughter has been dealing with the reality of my depression for so much of her life that I’m convinced it half bores her.” Many readers will feel the same way, no matter how much they empathize with a writer who confesses, “most of all I am tired of myself and my battles.” In the first sentence, Merkin introduces “the allure of suicide,” an option that never goes away. She believes in the benefits of decades of therapy and medication, without which it’s doubtful she would have been able to write this book. The author writes that the “root cause” of her depression is “the nature of the family itself, as rotten at its core as Hamlet’s Denmark,” and she builds a convincing case, particularly in regard to her cold, neglectful parents—though she finds it impossible to extricate herself from the mother who has ruined her. Hospital stays (the last was eight years ago) have provided respite and occasionally companionship, but circumstances have been rarely much better upon her exit. Merkin has deeply ambivalent feelings about electroshock treatment, resisting a doctor’s suggestion of how much she would benefit and then regretting her refusal. Those who have read her incisive and well-crafted pieces as a staff writer for the New Yorker and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Elle will wonder how she managed to get any work done when she was feeling so bad.
It’s hard to find much solace within the relentless gloom—however insightfully explored—of one writer’s depression.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14036-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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