![]() ![]() Her father was distant and seemingly beyond reach and effort. She spends a lot of time in the book reflecting on her mother-the parental figure typically associated with solace and care, but who for her provided neither with consistency. (Merkin recounts an incident where Jane repeatedly banged her head against a bathroom wall.) They mostly left her in the care of the family nanny, Jane, who Merkin describes as an "agent of her mother" and was also abusive. That's just the way her parents were, she says: cold, self-absorbed, authoritarian, and abusive. ![]() Her first experience of being taken to a psychiatric unit happened she was anxious and young, when her parents unceremoniously dropped her off at the Columbian Presbyterian's Babies' Hospital and didn't bother to explain why. She also sounds tired and a bit grumpy, though I can't tell if it's related to her being born and raised in a city that tends to cultivate that affect in even the most sane person over the years, or if it's because she's not feeling well.īut at this point in her life she has restored herself enough to avoid being hospitalized, for eight years and counting. When I call her for an interview she describes her current state as "muted." Over the phone, it is apparent that she is a New Yorker. Merkin is still depressed, after all years-but she is also still alive, and has raised a daughter to adulthood along the way, which means a lot. Thus Merkin's memoir proceeds with caution: She self-deprecatingly calls herself a "poor little rich girl" before you can, and she certainly does not assert she has any answers, not even to the questions that her own past brings up. "It seems to me that we are suspicious of depression's claim to legitimacy in part because it doesn't look crazy." Indeed, debilitating depressions, from the outside, tend to just look like periods of intense laziness, which Americans have little sympathy for. If there is something intangible about mental illness generally, depression is all the harder to define because it tends to creep in rather than announce itself, manifesting itself as an absence-of appetite, energy, sociability-rather than presence…" she writes. It does not, for example, fit neatly in with the literature of addiction and recovery, and it offers the reader no vicarious thrills, mostly because its symptoms are rarely florid enough to alienate or even titillate people. "There is something about the state that is both shameful and self-implicating in a way that other illnesses aren't. I have no proof of this, but the largest market for books about depression is probably other depressed people. Relaying that you have laid in bed for days and felt vaguely bad is hardly a story at all, unlike the destructive yet entertaining episodes that can be recounted by a drug addict. The latter is made the more difficult, Merkin writes, by the fact that depression is a boring topic of conversation. It seems to me that we are suspicious of depression's claim to legitimacy in part because it doesn't look crazy. (Merkin herself quotes many depressed writers throughout her memoir whose words have done the same for her, from Virginia Woolf to Jean Rhys, and relates to Joan Didion's Maria Wyeth.)įor those who have not experienced a deep personal abyss, Merkin's writing is instructive: She pulls you into the exhaustion of constantly turning over your history-jumping from formative scene to formative scene-for clues into your present pathologies, sexual and otherwise the pain of constructing meaning from the scraps of a life seemingly bereft of one the chore of managing your mood with pills and therapists, never quite sure if either are working and the strain of having to engage with other people outside of your own horrid mind on top of it all. Seeing the way the mental illness is roundly doubted, illuminated, endured by others is enough. I'm not even sure we would dare to hope for that much. This Close to Happy is neither overtly helpful nor reassuring to any depressed reader hoping to see that It Gets Better.īut, I assume, if most depressed readers of depressing books are like me, that's not really what we're in it for. She's now in her 60s, and her new book traces back the ostensible roots of her persistent despair to her Orthodox Jewish childhood under the "fascist regime" (her brother's words) of her wealthy but abusive parents, not from a safe distance, but inside of it. (I have promised myself suicide the way other people promise themselves a new car, gleaming and spiffy," she writes. She has, at times, been deeply suicidal, but she has kept herself from going through with it, almost to her dismay. ![]() Merkin, who grew up privileged, in a money sense, on Park Avenue, and became a successful New York writer, thinks of suicide often-more as a way to comfort herself than as an actual plan. Read more: Why People Smoke Weed to Treat Depression ![]()
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