This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

by Daphne Merkin Narrated by Suzanne Toren

Overview

A gifted and audacious writer confronts her lifelong battle with depression and her search for release

This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime.

Taking off from essays on depression she has written for the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction. She recounts the travails of growing up in a large, affluent family where there was a paucity of love and basics such as food and clothing despite the presence of a chauffeur and a cook. She goes on to recount her early hospitalization for depression in poignant detail, as well as her complex relationship with her mercurial, withholding mother.

Along the way Merkin also discusses her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. She eventually marries, has a child, and suffers severe postpartum depression, for which she is again hospitalized. Merkin also discusses her visits to various therapists and psychopharmocologists, which enables her to probe the causes of depression and its various treatments. The book ends in the present, where the writer has learned how to navigate her depression, if not “cure” it, after a third hospitalization in the wake of her mother's death.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Andrew Solomon

In the earlier part of [Merkin's] memoir, her tight focus on her own story at the expense of anyone else's can come off as self-indulgent, even self-aggrandizing, but it is part of her considerable art that by the end, it feels like a winning frankness. The reader is saved from diaristic fatigue by the sharpness of her observations. She is not out to demystify life on Park Avenue, nor even to apologize for it, but only to explain her experience, which happens to have unfolded there. She does not try to unpack the function of the amygdala, avoids all the statistics about the rate of the illness and does not apologize for her descents into darkness. Instead, she narrates what happened and how it felt to her. And she does so with insight, grace and excruciating clarity, in exquisite and sometimes darkly humorous prose…Merkin is unlikely to cheer you up, but if your misery loves company, you will find no better companion. This is not a how-to-get-better book, but we hardly need another one of those; it is a how-to-be-desolate book, which is an altogether more crucial manual.

From the Publisher

"[Merkin narrates] with insight, grace and excruciating clarity, in exquisite and sometimes darkly humorous prose . . . For all its highly personal focus, [This Close to Happy] is an important addition to the literature of mental illness." —Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"I will not be the last to thank Ms. Merkin for resisting this desire [to die] long enough to give us what is one of the most accurate, and therefore most harrowing, accounts of depression to be written in the last century . . . Ms. Merkin speaks candidly and beautifully about aspects of the human condition that usually remain pointedly silent." —John Kaag, Wall Street Journal

"Wry, self-aware . . . a work of lacerating intelligence about a condition that intellect cannot heal." —The New Yorker

"[A] triumph on many levels . . . As insightful and beautifully written as it is brave . . . This Close to Happyearns a place among the canon of books on depression . . . books that offer comfort to fellow depressives and elucidation for those lucky enough to have dodged its scourge." —Heller McAlpin, Washington Post

"[A] stunning self-portrait." —Christian Lorentzen, New York

“A hybrid of memoir, case study, and confession, which joins such classics as Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind and Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon in the contemporary literature of depression. . . Merkin has written [a book] that will illuminate, challenge, and possibly even console.” —Adam Kirsch, Tablet

"[This Close to Happy is] a testament to Merkin's commitment to capturing the grim distortions that depression can produce. . . This Close to Happy is more than a memoir of mental illness. Merkin is a good writer—perceptive, provocative, relentlessly interrogative of her own experience—and despite her difficult subject matter, she does, in this memoir, what good writers do: she sends urgent, cogent dispatches from another world, a protracted battlefield that we might not otherwise know about." —Lisa Fetchko, Los Angeles Review of Books

"[A] compelling chronicle . . . Merkin's work is unique in describing the mundane burden of a deeply felt and closely observed life lived with depression . . . [H]er account of depression is both personal, literary and, at the same time, existential." —Tom Teicholz, Forbes

“Merkin is a wonderful writer whose keen eye for detail and human foibles enables her to brilliantly light her subject. . . . In page after page, she delivers elegant, evocative prose.” —Psychology Today

"This Close to Happy is as illuminating and hard to put down as it is painful." —People

"Merkin is a fine stylist . . . She has at her disposal wide-ranging allusions, and she draws on poetry with a charming ease, a frankness that assumes her reader’s sophistication, even as she capably holds the reader’s hand and clarifies the relevance of a particular reference.” —Forward

"Daphne Merkin exhibits shocking honesty in allowing readers to look into her journey. . . Her depth of writing experience on the topic comes through in emotion-packed prose . . . This book offers the education necessary for readers need to follow depression as it rises and falls in one woman’s life, as well as in the lives of thousands of others." —Wyatt Massey, America Magazine

“Merkin’s deeply intimate account of living with clinical depression is illuminating, heartbreaking, and powerfully written. With lively prose and shrewd observations . . . Merkin’s exploration into her complicated yet unconditional devotion to her mother is rendered with compassion and profound perception. Merkin eloquently blends the personal with the researched; her intellectual tenacity and emotional rawness impress as much as they entertain. This book is a wonderful addition to literature about the unrelenting battle against depression.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Dark thoughts hover over virtually every page of this mesmerizing memoir, and yet there is also the very real possibility of hope. . . Merkin’s exceptional book belongs on the same shelf as such classics as William Styron’s Darkness Visible (1990) and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind (1995).” —Booklist (starred review)

“[Merkin] has a signature method to her writing, one that exuberantly crosshatches high- and lowbrow, and one that reveals and protects in equal measure.” —Bookforum

“Opening This Close to Happy was like getting a long letter from my best friend at sleepaway camp. I had no idea it was this bad for you, was my first thought, and then, we have both been so paralyzed by grief. This is why we all feel so lonely right now—the longing, the depression, the comedy of it all, wrapped up in a story about sex and Judaism, our mothers. I felt so whole when snuggling up alone with Merkin’s brilliant, full-of-feeling masterpiece. I flew through it and hated to let go when it ended.” —Jill Soloway

“Fierce, clear-eyed, and beautifully honest, Daphne Merkin’s is an essential voice. This Close to Happy, a lucid and elegantly written account of her lifelong struggles withdepression, unsettles and illuminates in equal measure. This is an important book.” —Claire Messud

“If the face presented to the world is a mask to protect ourselves, Daphne Merkin bravely removes hers, revealing the truth of herself, courageously exploring, seeking—and sometimes even finding—the hope that glimmers at the end of the tunnel. Please read as soon as possible.” —Gloria Vanderbilt

“This beautifully written tale of Daphne Merkin’s depressive demons is by far the most accurate and human account of depression and its impact that I have ever read. I highly recommend it, both to those in the mental health professions and to those who care about the suffering of their loved ones.” —Glen O. Gabbard, M.D.

“The greatness of this book is in the way Merkin takes the measure of the adversary.” —Peter Sacks

“D. W. Winnicott wrote that depression is the fog over the battlefield. In this extraordinarily lucid and moving book, Daphne Merkin illuminates the dark and desperate battle that depression can be. This is a book for all those who know nothing about depression and for those who know too much.” —Adam Phillips

“This Close to Happy belongs on the shelf with William Styron's Darkness, Visible and Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon. It brings a stunningly perceptive voice to the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.” —Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice

"This Close to Happy is honest, fearless in the way we have come to expect from Daphne Merkin, and, as a bonus, frankly informative. From Merkin we get the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome. As she writes, 'the opposite of depression is not a state of unimaginable happiness, but a state of relative all-right-ness.' For some, that insight alone will speak volumes. Her candor discussing the fears, tribulations, and triumphs of a lifetime of treatment will be valuable for anyone who loves someone with depression but makes necessary reading for the mental health professionals on the other side of the couch." —Harold S. Koplewicz, M.D., President, Child Mind Institute

Kirkus Reviews

2016-11-20
A writer reflects on her unceasing struggle with clinical depression.Although Merkin (The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags, 2014, etc.) is an undeniably talented writer, this memoir of her depression is as tough to read as it must have been to write. This is "the book about depression that I had been contacted to write by three successive publishing houses over the course of more than a decade," and the author admits that "my daughter has been dealing with the reality of my depression for so much of her life that I'm convinced it half bores her." Many readers will feel the same way, no matter how much they empathize with a writer who confesses, "most of all I am tired of myself and my battles." In the first sentence, Merkin introduces "the allure of suicide," an option that never goes away. She believes in the benefits of decades of therapy and medication, without which it's doubtful she would have been able to write this book. The author writes that the "root cause" of her depression is "the nature of the family itself, as rotten at its core as Hamlet's Denmark," and she builds a convincing case, particularly in regard to her cold, neglectful parents—though she finds it impossible to extricate herself from the mother who has ruined her. Hospital stays (the last was eight years ago) have provided respite and occasionally companionship, but circumstances have been rarely much better upon her exit. Merkin has deeply ambivalent feelings about electroshock treatment, resisting a doctor's suggestion of how much she would benefit and then regretting her refusal. Those who have read her incisive and well-crafted pieces as a staff writer for the New Yorker and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Elle will wonder how she managed to get any work done when she was feeling so bad. It's hard to find much solace within the relentless gloom—however insightfully explored—of one writer's depression.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169779929
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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