Reading the Times last weekend was a curious exercise in juxtapositions. First, I read an article called “On Top of the Happiness Racket” about Gretchen Rubin’s book, “The Happiness Project.” Then I turned to the magazine section and found an article by Jonah Lehrer, entitled “Depression’s Upside.” The title of this essay was a quote contained in that article by neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, who interviewed 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop about their mental history, and found that eighty percent of them met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression.
novelist, essayist, teacher
April is the Cruelest Month
November 24, 2009 by 7 Comments
Angel, Passy Cemetery (photo by Ron Davis)
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
T.S. Eliott – The Wasteland
Eliott was right, at least as far as my family is concerned.
On Easter Sunday, April 6, 1996, my brother Bernie went to dinner at the home of family friends. By all accounts he ate well and laughed and left saying he’d see everyone later. Then he went home and hanged himself.
From this broken hill…
October 28, 2009 by 6 Comments
I recently heard of an internationally acclaimed author whose work I admire IMMENSELY, having his newly finished novel turned down. (And no, I’m not going to name names.) I don’t know why the book was turned down, although I can’t imagine it was because it wasn’t well written. This man is simply incapable of writing a bad sentence. I’ve been thinking of him a lot. You can imagine the pain of working so hard for so many years to develop a readership; how you might deservedly feel, after lots of praise and attention and prizes and so forth, that you’ve earned the right to keep on publishing, and then…it stops; you’re silenced. Agony. I pray he’ll find the inner resources to come back from this, to keep the faith, to write again, but who knows. A blow like that can silence you forever. It can send you into depression’s bottomless pit; it can break you.
