Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Psychology

THIS CLOSE TO HAPPY

Daphne Merkin

A Reckoning With Depression

An candid and literary book about depression in the vein of andrew Solomon's "The Noonday Demon". A gifted and audicious 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.

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 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 trevails 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. Daphne Merkin, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, is a regular contributor to ELLE. Her writing frequently appears in The New York Times, Bookforum, Departures, Travel + Leisure, W, Vogue, and other publications. Merkin has taught writing at the 92nd Street Y, Marymount, and Hunter College. Her previous books include ENCHANTMENT (a novel), DREAMING OF HITLER (a collection of essays) and THE FAME LUNCHES. She lives in New York City.

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Book Published 2017-02-01 by Farrar Strauss Giroux

Comments

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.

“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.How hard it is to behappy.I felt so whole when snuggling up alone with Merkin’s brilliant, full-of-feeling masterpiece. Reading it was dreamy in the saddest, best way. I flew through it and hated to let go when it ended. Daphne Merkin’s existence as a writer made and makes me feel possible.”

Merkin has a signature method to her writing, one that exuberantly crosshatches high-and lowbrow, and one that reveals and protects in equal measure. It's at once candid and curious,taboo-busting and respectable.

“Merkin’s deeply intimate account of living with clinical depression is illuminating, heartbreaking, and powerfully written. With lively prose and shrewd observations, Merkin (Dreaming of Hitler) examines the contending discourses on the potential causes of depression as she bravely exposes her lifelong struggle with suicidal thoughts and attempts to overcome them….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 battles against depression.”

Merkin, who was first hospitalized for psychiatric issues at the age of eight, dissects her often inexplicable sadness clearly, with painfully intimate details about her medical regimen and her family. (“Your tears don’t move me,” her mother used to tell her.) For those who know this terrain personally, Merkin’s wry, self-aware account of the daily slog toward hope—or, at least, functionality—may be a validation; for those struggling to understand, it is a work of lacerating intelligence about a condition that intellect cannot heal.

[Merkin] 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. Read more...

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.

great interview with Saul Austerlitz about one of the most "universal and deeply human questions" Read more...

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.

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 into the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.