A “searingly honest and riveting” (Colm Tóibín) memoir interweaving the author’s descent into depression with a medical and cultural history of the illness.
At the age of twenty-seven, Mary Cregan gives birth to her first child, a daughter she names Anna. But it’s apparent that something is terribly wrong, and two days later, Anna dies—plunging Cregan into suicidal despair. Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on this pivotal experience and attempts to make sense of it. She weaves together literature and research with details from her own ordeal—and the still-visible scar of her suicide attempt—while also considering her life as part of the larger history of our understanding of depression.
Mary Cregan attended Middlebury College and received her PhD from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and in the Financial Times. A lecturer in English literature at Barnard College, she lives in New York.
“The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and
readability.”—Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die ...
Those who travel to look at Colorado will find as much meaning in Marshall Sprague’s
well-told story of its historical conflict as will those who live with the beauty—and the challenge. Mountains—so beautiful, the land dominated by the Colorado Rockies, ...
A Business Week Best Book of the Year.... A devastating and wholly necessary book.—Studs Terkel,
author of Working In The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett, among the country's most distinguished thinkers . . . has concentrated into 176 pages a ...
A perennially useful survey of how physical environment affects historical events, with many illustrative examples.
In studying the inescapable physical setting of history, writes the author, the geographer examines one of the strands from which history itself is woven. To ...
ONE OF THE MOST LOVED NOVELS OF THE DECADE. A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting
an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness. Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening ...
The late Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Bruce Catton is known to millions of readers for his absorbing
works on the Civil War. In this book, he turns to his native Michigan to tell a story of what happened when a primitive wilderness ...
Missourians could hardly have made a more appropriate decision than to name their capital city
after Thomas Jefferson. A meeting-place of major rivers, Missouri became a gateway to the promised land—the beckoning West opened up to Americans by Jefferson's Louisiana ...
Few other states can match Oklahoma's reputation as a last frontier. Indians, pioneers, land rushes,
and oil dominate many an American's picture of Oklahoma's history. Incomplete as such an impression is, the frontier experience did leave a heritage of individualism ...
