A beautifully crafted, unflinching account of a young Englishwoman’s battle with the demons in her psyche. Less than two weeks after the birth of her second daughter, Shaw begins a dismaying, inexorable slide into deep depression. She starts a journal to record what is happening to her mind and body. Paralyzing fear drives her to her bed, which becomes her prison; intense feelings of self-loathing are expressed in self-inflicted bites, burns, and scratches to her face and hands. She starves herself and drinks only enough fluids to breastfeed her baby. It is inevitable that Shaw is confined to a psychiatric unit, where she is diagnosed as suffering from postpartum depression. There she is given, over time, 16 electroshock treatments (ECT), the therapy of choice when psychotic depression will not yield to drugs. Shaw finds it humiliating. It leaves her “stunned and disoriented,” with no memory of what has happened. When doctors cannot tell her why she is depressed, and refuse her pleas for psychoanalysis, Shaw begins to read everything she can find on depression. The psychiatric textbooks she first consults reduce patients to cases, symptoms, and disease processes. But Shaw is convinced her depression is more than physical, that in fact it lies deep within herself. Seeking confirmation, Shaw reads William Styron’s retrospective Darkness Visible, an account of his own depression which Styron characterizes as an “aberrant biochemical process.” Shaw is heartened however, by his concession that it might have grown out of a feeling of great loss. Marie Cardinal’s book The Words To Say It inspires Shaw to continue her journey of self-revelation through her writing and in psychoanalysis. Composing Myself both charts Shaw’s reclamation of her life and bears witness to her courage in the face of a recalcitrant mind-altering disorder.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-883642-97-3
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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