An analytical remembrance that will likely empower and reassure Christian readers who are battling depression themselves.
A debut memoir traces how one woman ended a 13-year struggle with postpartum depression through therapy and religious faith.
Orcutt, a former occupational therapist in Massachusetts, plunged into what she calls “the deepest and darkest spiral of my life” after the birth of her second child. The author sensitively probes how her extreme postpartum depression brought up unaddressed traumas from her past, including her sense of being an unworthy replacement for her dead older sister, as well as memories of sexual abuse when she was 7 years old. Orcutt had long wrestled with eating disorders, and had also turned to alcohol and cutting herself for a time. For her depression, she underwent 20 electroshock treatments, took medication, and pursued talk therapy. The shock treatments and drugs failed to help her, though, and she was given a diagnosis of “severe medicine resistant clinical depression.” In total, she would have six stays in mental hospitals, where she was placed on suicide watches. One thing that did help, she says, was her therapy—the book is dedicated in part to her therapist, who became her “lifeline” and was the first to give her the idea for this writing project. Journaling, yoga, and her strong Christian faith were further sources of succor. This book has relatively few instances of reconstructed scenes and dialogue, compared with most other memoirs. Instead, it’s heavy on self-analysis, which is unsurprising, given its origin in therapy sessions. However, the author also uses recurring oceanic metaphors—a tidal wave, swimming, drowning, and so on—to very good effect: “Although I was still adrift in the deep ocean, I sensed I was no longer a lone castaway in my journey.” Ultimately, Orcutt conveys a clear sense of how depression affected her relationship with her family—noting, for example, that at one point her husband “essentially became both ‘mom and dad’ for our daughters”—while also charting her progression from rock bottom to tentative healing.
An analytical remembrance that will likely empower and reassure Christian readers who are battling depression themselves.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-6670-7
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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