Description
Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome. The opposite of depression, she writes with characteristic insight, is not a state of unimaginable happiness . . . but a state of relative all-right-ness.
Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that many share but few talk about, one that remains shrouded in stigma.
For readers of Andrew Solomon and Ariel Levy
National Indie Bestseller
Author Information
Daphne Merkin is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and a regular contributor to ELLE. Her writing frequently appears in The New York Times, Bookforum, Departures, Travel + Leisure, W, Vogue, and other publications. Her previous books include Enchantment, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for best novel on a Jewish theme, and The Fame Lunches, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. She lives in New York City.
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