BALLAD OF THE BLACK AND BLUE MIND

BALLAD OF THE BLACK AND BLUE MIND weaves stories of psychoanalysts and their patients against the bright-lights backdrop of their relentless city, New York. Anne Roiphe's characters are cutters and thieves, disappointed and disappointing children, the sexually confused, true and false friends. Dr. Estelle Berman is a distinguished psychiatrist who lives and practices on the Upper West Side. She observes her own decline with much the same acceptance with which she observes the idiosyncrasies of her patients, some of whom she likes more than others. Her patients are Justine, the movie star, and the daughter of a colleague; Edith Forman, who is very large and writes poems; and Anna, a college student whose parents are both well-published academics, who cuts herself. Estelle often changes her clothes between patients. And there is her own son Gerald, who has never been close to Estelle as he was to her late husband. And now there is his son, Ryan, who is the first to understand that there is something wrong with the doctor herself.

BALLAD OF THE BLACK AND BLUE MIND is a novel of psychological realities that cut close to the bone, a book that dares to observe knowingly the vanities of which we are made.

Writer, essayist, and journalist Anne Roiphe is known and revered for such novels as Up the Sandbox, 1185 Park Avenue, and Lovingkindness, and for her memoirs: Art and Madness and Epilogue. In addition to her eighteen fiction and non-fiction books, she has written articles for The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Elle, among others, and for many years she wrote columns for The New York Observer and for The Jerusalem Report. Her book, Fruitful, was a finalist for the National Book Award.