This Close to Happy by Daphne Merkin

This Close to Happy by Daphne Merkin

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.

Daphne Merkin is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and has written regularly for periodicals like Elle, Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, and the New York Times Book Review. Her previous books include Enchantment, a novel, and Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays. She lives in New York City.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780374140366
ISBN 10	0374140367
Title	This Close to Happy
Author	Daphne Merkin
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
Year published	2017-02-07
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.