Go
 

  Get this audio book:




Learn More About
Find More Titles by
This Author: Daphne Merkin
This Narrator: Suzanne Toren
This Publisher: Blackstone Audio

This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression by Daphne Merkin

This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

by Daphne Merkin


Video About This Audio Book



Title Details

Author
Narrator
Publisher
 
Unabridged Edition
Running Time
9 Hrs. 37 Min.

Description

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 enable 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.


People Who Liked This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression Also Liked These Titles:
  Labyrinths
by Catrine Clay

  Insight
by Tasha Eurich

  The Learning Brain
by Thad A. Polk