Research Catalog

Title

This close to happy : a reckoning with depression / Daphne Merkin.

Author

Merkin, Daphne

Publication

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

288 pages; 22 cm

Summary

• "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 of 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. "--
• "This Close to Happy is the first account to endeavor to tell the story of what it feels to suffer a lifetime's worth of clinical depression from the inside out and from a woman's point of view"--

Subjects

• Psychotherapist and patient
• Women > Health and hygiene
• BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
• Postpartum depression > Treatment
• Postpartum depression > United States > Biography
• Merkin, Daphne > Mental health
• Depressed persons > Biography

Call Number

JFD 17-2766

ISBN

• 9780374140366
• 0374140367

LCCN

2016025616

OCLC

2016025616

Author

Merkin, Daphne, author.

Title

This close to happy : a reckoning with depression / Daphne Merkin.

Publisher

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Edition

First edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Research Call Number

JFD 17-2766