This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression - Hardcover

Merkin, Daphne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374140367 ISBN 13: 9780374140366

Verlag: FARRAR STRAUSS & GIROUX, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of 2016

“Despair is always described as dull,” writes Daphne Merkin, “when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.” This Close to Happy—Merkin’s rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression—captures this strange light.

Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls “the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome.” The arc of Merkin’s affliction is lifelong, beginning in a childhood largely bereft of love and stretching into the present, where Merkin lives a high-functioning life and her depression is manageable, if not “cured.” “The opposite of depression,” she writes with characteristic insight, “is not a state of unimaginable happiness . . . but a state of relative all-right-ness.”

In this dark yet vital memoir, Merkin describes not only the harrowing sorrow that she has known all her life, but also her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that many share but few talk about, one that remains shrouded in stigma. In the words of the distinguished psychologist Carol Gilligan, “It brings a stunningly perceptive voice into the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daphne Merkin is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and a regular contributor to Elle. Her writing frequently appears in The New York Times, Bookforum, Departures, Travel + Leisure, W, Vogue, Tablet Magazine, and other publications. Merkin has taught writing at the 92nd Street Y, Marymount College, and Hunter College. Her previous books include Enchantment, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for best novel on a Jewish theme, and two collections of essays, Dreaming of Hitler and The Fame Lunches, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in New York City.

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This Close to Happy

A Reckoning with Depression

By Daphne Merkin

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2017 Daphne Merkin
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-374-14036-6

CHAPTER 1

A woman is standing in her kitchen, making a pot of coffee, spooning out the pungent overpriced ground beans from their snappy little aluminum bag into a paper filter, trying to remember what number tablespoon she was on — four? six? three? — before the dark thoughts began tumbling in, doing their wild and wily gymnastics: You shouldn't, you should have, why are you, why aren't you, there's no hope, it's too late, it's always been too late, give up, go back to bed, there's no hope, the day is half gone, no, the day ahead is too long, there's so much to do, there's not enough to do, everything is futile, there is no hope.

What, she wonders for the zillionth time, would it be like to be someone with a brighter take on things, with a more sustainable sense of the purposefulness of his or her existence? Someone possessed of the necessary illusions — that things make sense and will work out for the better, especially if you cultivate your own garden — without which life is unbearable? Surely that person would be sticking with the coffee, not leapfrogging to suicidal desires at the first promptings of despair? What, that is, would it be like to be someone showered and dressed and more or less ready to face the day, not jumping for joy but not hobbled by gloom, either? For surely this is the worst part of being someone who is at the mercy of her own mind the way she is, pickled in the brine of self-hatred: the fact that there is no way out of the reality of being her, no relief in sight other than through forceful or at least conscientious intervention — talk therapy, medication, attempts at forward-march thinking, remembering the starving and the maimed and the generally less fortunate — until she's up and standing and has hauled herself forward to that point of preparedness other people seem to arrive at with a naturalness of purpose that is utterly foreign to her.

The kitchen has a window that looks across a courtyard to other buildings, other lives. It is done up in bright antidepressant colors — orange and purple and aqua — and the recessed spotlights are on but it feels cast in shadows all the same. The woman in question has gone to great lengths to make her apartment feel inviting, and other people always respond positively to her choice of colors, art, and knickknacks; but when the wind of the dark season comes rustling around her, all her attentive homemaking efforts are to no avail. She has also gone to great lengths to create a life that includes a close relationship with her daughter and intimate friendships; a passionate interest in the surrounding culture in both its deeper and more frivolous aspects; and meaningful work as a writer. She is appreciated for her gimlet eye, her curiosity, her wry humor and warmth; from the outside in, her life might strike others as good, if not enviable. She knows this on some level but the knowledge dries up as the wind howls through her, reminding her that she feels barren and lost and quite without hope.

The plunge in mood can be sudden and steep, taking her unawares: one minute she's feeling more or less okay, the next like shooting her head off. It can occur on a Monday afternoon, for instance, when she's returned home from a dentist appointment to an empty apartment and the very motes in the air strike her as desolate. She feels isolated, stuck in a cave of grief, of ancient and permanent sorrow. And then, right on the wings of this feeling, gurgling up from somewhere inside her, comes the impulse to kill herself. It's so strong that she goes over to the wood block of knives that sits on the kitchen counter and takes one out, running its serrated edge across her thumb. She envisions herself slashing her wrists ... no, filling a bathtub with water first and then slashing her wrists, isn't that the way to ensure death, the way Diane Arbus did it? To stop herself from thinking about it any further, she gets into her bed and lies there, waiting for the impulse to pass.

Then again, the dark season can take its own sweet time to make itself known, stretching out over weeks or even months until it announces itself as having irrevocably arrived. The particular afternoon alluded to here puts in an appearance in mid-March, but it could just as likely be a day in mid-December, or mid-August. The condition that envelops her respects no calendar; it arrives precisely when it feels like it. To the woman, it seems as if she has felt this way, in one form or another, for what feels like forever. She is always noticing the grime on the bricks, the flaws in her friends, the heartache lying in wait — the sadness that courses just underneath the skin of life, like blood.

Depression is a global problem, affecting 350 million people worldwide; in the United States 16 million people had at least one major depressive episode in 2012, and in 2014 there were more than 40,000 deaths by suicide. And yet this is a sadness that no one seems to want to talk about in public, not even in this Age of Indiscretion. At cocktail parties, for instance, you can talk endlessly about attending AA meetings or your stint in rehab without raising any eyebrows. But just imagine trying to tell the truth about how you feel at an upscale social gathering, where everyone's milling around, wine glass in hand, keeping a narrowed eye out for the next person, the person who isn't you:

"How are you?"

"Not fine. Very depressed, in fact. Can barely get out of bed. Have no idea what's happening in the world lately and don't much care."

Who wants to hear it? Has ever wanted to hear it? Will ever want to hear it? In spite of our anything-goes, tell-all culture, so much of the social realm is closed against too much real personal disclosure, too much ruffling of the surface. We live in a society that is embarrassed by interiority, unless it is presented in a shrill, almost campy style under the aegis of the recovery movement, with its insistence on dramatic personal testimony. Rigorous self-reflection — a sober and nuanced wrestling with personal demons — has gone out with the great, vexed Victorians, like John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold.

Nor is the private realm particularly conducive to airing this sort of implacable feeling, no matter how affectionate or willing to listen friends are. Depression, in its insistence on its own stubborn one-note reality, becomes boring for other people to hear about, patient as they may initially be. Take a yoga class, they advise, or Get a massage. Just don't go on and on about it, is what they don't say, but you can see the resistance to joining you in your gloom in the set of their jaw.

When the woman finally disappears once again into the murky haze of the dark season — it has crept in as it always does, an invasion of negative thoughts that take over her interior, unnoticed by others, making no sound, raising no alarms except to she who hosts it, and by then it's too late — its malignant work is done and there is no one to intervene on her behalf.

This woman has a child named Zoë, a vivid daughter in her twenties with whom she laughs until the tears run in the emotionally incestuous way of mothers and daughters. She worries that Zoë has, willy-nilly, been placed too much in a caretaker role, keeping one eye out for a mother who was first hospitalized for depression six months after her birth — and again...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: FARRAR STRAUSS & GIROUX
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374140367
• ISBN 13: 9780374140366
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar