Review by New York Times Review
FEW things in life are sadder or more frightening than watching a loved one transported far away, swiftly and irrevocably, by illness. In the summer of 1996, Michael Greenberg's vivacious 15-year-old daughter, Sally, was gripped by a psychotic episode from which she and her family are still recovering. "I feel like I'm traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to," a troubled Sally says in the opening passage of "Hurry Down Sunshine," Greenberg's remarkable account of his attempts to reckon with his daughter's manic depression - or madness, as he prefers to call it. Sally's transformation is sudden and devastating. "She had learned to speak from me; she had heard her first stories from me," Greenberg writes. "And yet from one day to the next we had become strangers." Sally enters a feverish mental state, writing and pacing and talking and arguing and pushing. Greenberg and his wife, Pat, take her to the hospital, where she is placed in the "Quiet Room," a shoebox space whose erasable board says: "Sally Greenberg. No Privileges. No Visitors. Level Zero." Her comrades on the ward include Noah, a young Hasidic Jew whose family believes his fervent and manic praying shows he has achieved devaykah, or communion with God. Sometimes, the spare dialogue has echoes of Beckett: "I don't know who I am," Sally tells Pat, her stepmother, while at Bellevue. Pat responds, "Did you ever know?" Sally shakes her head, No. "Then nothing's changed," Pat says. There are endless visits to doctors, and many medications. Greenberg's points of reference are more literary than medical. "On chlorpromazine, the poet Robert Lowell was unable to build a three-letter word on a Scrabble board or follow the count of balls and strikes in a televised baseball game," he writes. "Sally would experience a similar intellectual paralysis." But she needed slowing down: patients with Sally's illness have been known to drop dead from manic exhaustion. In one harrowing scene, Greenberg swallows some of her ahtipsychotic medication to try to understand the fog enveloping her. "I feel dizzy and far away, as if I am about to fall from a great height but my feet are nailed to the edge of the precipice," he writes. He understands how Sally says she has been "packed in foam rubber." In an effort to rouse himself, he stabs his hand with a fork. At times, Greenberg is consumed by anger and frustration; at one point, he even strikes Pat. Occasionally, the outside world creeps in. It's the summer of 1996. TWA Flight 800 explodes over Long Island. Greenberg finds himself oddly drawn to the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, "with his lame arm and his noble effort to conceal it, his pinched expression of perpetually suppressed pain," while Bill Clinton's "unrelenting sunniness fills me with unease." Eventually, Sally emerges from her fog and returns to start the new school year - only to succumb to psychosis again years later. Greenberg often invokes James Joyce, who blamed himself for his daughter Lucia's mental illness and feared that his work on "Finnegans Wake," a novel of hermetic wordplay, had somehow precipitated her collapse. "Whatever spark of gift I possess," Joyce said, "has been transmitted to her and has kindled a fire in her brain." Like Joyce, Greenberg has a deep writerly connection to his daughter. After she recovers from her first bout, she tells him: "I really believed my vision would crush you, Dad, because you, more than anyone, were toiling to get your genius back, but you couldn't, you were trying too hard." She describes her psychosis as an ability to "see underneath the surface of things ... see inside people." After Sally's first, tenuous recovery, her mother, Robin, confesses she still hasn't given up the idea that Sally is "in touch with a higher force." Greenberg responds, "I wish she'd get back in touch with the lower one." And Robin says, "It wouldn't kill you to think positively for once in a blue moon." But Greenberg's refusal - or inability - to think positively, or reductively, is one of his best qualities. What sets "Hurry Down Sunshine" apart from the great horde of mediocre memoirs, with their sitcom emotions and too neatly resolved fights and reconciliations, is Greenberg's frank pessimism, dark humor and fundamental incapacity to make sense of his daughter's ordeal, let alone to derive an uplifting moral from it. Beyond grappling with Sally's illness, Greenberg also probes his family history. With little fanfare or commentary, he lays bare tangled family dynamics in all their raw power. When Greenberg and Pat eventually decide to have a child together, Sally tells Pat matter-of-factly: "You'll never love me as much as your own baby. It's the biological law." Sibling rivalries stretch back generations. Greenberg's father ran a scrap metal business in Brooklyn and never understood his son's literary interests. Greenberg, one of five brothers, was especially close with his mother. When his brothers grew jealous, the young Greenberg willfully drifted away from her, a rift that began to heal only with Sally's illness. Over drinks in a bar near Bellevue, his mother tells him how much she resented the birth of one of her sons, Steve, and how she blames herself for his emotional disturbances. Indeed, one source of the book's Russian-novel drama - and humor lies in Greenberg's exchanges with Steve, who is often paranoid and has become prone to violent outbursts since the death of their father two years earlier. Steve thinks people are out to get him, and sometimes they are - or at least out to evict him. Steve lives in a studio apartment in a now gentrified building, resented and feared by his neighbors. Each week, Greenberg takes his brother to buy his groceries, including 100 bags of Lipton tea; Steve steeps five at a time in an old pickle jar and drinks sitting in a rotting Barcalounger. BUT beyond family drama, "Hurry Down Sunshine" is a very New York book, filled with the kind of characters increasingly rare in a city where real kooks can no longer afford to live. As the book opens, Greenberg, Pat and Sally live in a poorly maintained, top-floor tenement apartment on Bank Street that Greenberg, a freelance writer, rents from an aspiring author who offers low rent in exchange for help with the building and encouragement for the unpromising novel he has been "revising" for years. When Sally gets sick, Greenberg has no health insurance. "Whatever the bill comes to, I'll pay it; I give you my word," Greenberg tells the hospital administrator when Sally is committed. "Apparently your word is all you can give me," she responds. In the past few years, Greenberg has written about his brother Steve and many other matters in the "Freelance" column of The Times Literary Supplement, where he has established himself as a quirky New York Jewish voice in an unlikely venue. Even to seasoned Manhattanites, these dispatches are utterly fresh and unexpected, postcards from a boho New York where there are still artists, writers, strivers, wackos, teachers - and rent control. There's no news peg, no amused detachment, no slick packaging or knowing irony; imagine The Talk of the Town as if written by Dostoyevsky. In a recent column, Greenberg described his family's response to "Hurry Down Sunshine." Steve didn't want anything to do with it, while Robin "praised the book in a strained, dutiful voice that concealed her objections." Much to Greenberg's relief, Sally, who now lives near her mother in Vermont, gave him her blessing, with some caveats. "You weren't fair to Mom," she tells him. "You made her out to be some kind of New Age flake." But on the whole she is pleased. "I felt I was reading about someone else, a 15-year-old girl named Sally who had been to hell and was the only one who didn't know it," she says. "How many people get to look at themselves in such a way?" Rachel Donadio, a former writer and editor at the Book Review, is the Rome bureau chief for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Summertime, and the living is easy, but not for Greenberg, whose 15-year-old daughter, Sally, has a psychotic break on the steamy streets of Greenwich Village. In this compelling memoir, Greenberg traces Sally's harrowing journey: her admission to a psychiatric ward; diagnosis of bipolar disorder (a relief for Greenberg, who feared the forbidding label of schizophrenia); and finally her adjustment, with the help of a truckload of medication, to a life forever changed. Greenberg, divorced from Sally's New-Agey mother, Robin, and now remarried to more matter-of-fact Pat, must hold his family together as Sally falls apart. (In his darkest moments, he fears that his daughter's life will go the way of his mentally unbalanced and barely independent older brother, Steve.) Greenberg, a native New Yorker and columnist for the Times Literary Supplement, writes with unflinching honesty and heart. He brilliantly renders daily life in a Manhattan psych ward inhabited by a manic professor, a mango-devouring flirt, and an Orthodox Jewish man whose family members interpret his madness as a sort of communication with God. He even takes a dose of his daughter's medication to try to understand her state of mind. The result is a startling piece of writing, by turns sobering and surreal.--Block, Allison Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Greenberg, a columnist for London's Times Literary Supplement, was living in Greenwich Village in 1996 when his 15-year-old daughter, Sally, suddenly became manic, importuning strangers and ranting in the streets about her newfound cosmic wisdom. She was a danger to herself and others, so her father and stepmother had her committed to a psychiatric facility. Greenberg was no stranger to mental illness; he'd been caring for his dysfunctional brother most of their adult lives. Still, Sally was so brilliant, so caring, he couldn't bear the thought of her ending up like his brother. During the 24 long days Sally spent in the hospital, Greenberg learned to cope. He watched a Hasidic family visiting with their mentally ill young man. He pondered his ex-wife going to cuddle with Sally, as if she were still a little girl. He listened to his mother explain her troubled marriage and the subsequent mental illness of his brother. He wondered at his present wife's resilience. After Sally's discharge, questions of how they would adjust to their new lives were complicated in very different ways. In this well-written and sincere memoir, Greenberg proves to be a caring man trying to find his way through the minefield of a loved one's madness. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
One night Greenberg's daughter Sally had a psychotic break and became a stranger to her father. Confusion, anguish, sadness, and guilt are palpable in his voice as Greenberg narrates his attempts to hold his family together and understand Sally's disease. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
