Review by Booklist Review
In this marvelous, heartbreaking, and beautifully revealing memoir, Antrim (The Emerald Light in the Air, 2014) lays bare his struggles with extreme depression, a condition he labels "suicide." Beginning with a near-suicide attempt when he was in his 40s, Antrim heartbreakingly chronicles being raised by two alcoholics, which expands on the stories he told about his mother in The Afterlife (2006). This memoir is unusually structured, reading as one long report that feels like controlled chaos, drifting back and forth through the past and the present as Antrim is seemingly writing to try to find meaning, closure, and purpose related to his experiences. After his near suicide, Antrim was hospitalized. When no treatment was helping, David Foster Wallace encouraged him to try electroconvulsive therapy, which, if only for a short time, did help. Antrim magnificently captures the self-loathing many depressives constantly feel--that they are a burden, a pariah, and that this is how they will always be. Partly inspired by William Styron's Darkness Visible (1989), this is a similarly affecting account of extreme depression. While it is emotionally draining--Antrim does not shy away from the realities of his condition--his honesty is in some ways comforting, and this painstakingly and gloriously written work might make some readers feel less alone.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"A depression is a concavity, a sloping downward and a return. Suicide, in my experience, is not that," writes MacArthur genius and novelist Antrim (Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World) in this unflinching interrogation of the "social disease" he struggled with for more than a decade. Using his own experience to challenge traditional narratives around suicide, he argues it isn't an "act or a choice" but instead "a long illness... with origins in trauma and isolation... violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging." In 2006, just before publishing a memoir about his late abusive, alcoholic mother, Antrim came close to, as he puts it, letting himself fall from the fire escape of his four-story apartment building. Four months in a psychiatric institute followed, where, as Antrim relates in lucid prose, he underwent electroconvulsive therapy (it worked, but didn't keep him out of the hospital long). "Dying in psychosis, in isolation from others, takes place in a kind of eternity," he observes, as the text--which melts the past and present down into exhaustive lists of his grievances and questions around mental illness--mirrors the psychological "paralysis of suicide." The light at the end of this painfully eloquent tunnel is the conclusion that no one should venture through the darkness alone. Readers looking to better understand the nuances of mental illness would do well start with this profoundly affecting account. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Unflinchingly honest accounts of the author's personal experiences and his perceptions of societal misunderstandings about suicide. Antrim begins this concise memoir on the evening in April 2006 when he almost plummeted from his Brooklyn fire escape. "I was there to die," he writes, "but dying was not a plan. I was not making choices, threats, or mistakes. I was…looking back now, in acceptance. It was a relinquishing, though at the time I would not have been able to articulate that. I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I had my pain and my reasons." Immediately preceding this event was strife with his girlfriend, but his illness--what Antrim qualifies by stating, "I try not to speak about depression. I prefer to call it suicide"--started in childhood. This story, parts of which first appeared in the New Yorker, is not one of survival after the fall but of holding on. After not jumping, Antrim, then 47, checked himself into a hospital and spent four months at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Fractured into vignettes of anguished memories, lists of medications, and ruminations, the narrative is defiantly nonlinear and brilliantly reflective of the author's state of being: anxious, inert, unworthy. Unlike a flat line, Antrim's talent for storytelling is more similar to Russian nesting dolls: moments within moments that build upon each other as recollections and revelations. The treatment that proved most effective was electroconvulsive therapy, of which Antrim had been terrified. Interestingly, he decided to try it after receiving a call from David Foster Wallace, who'd heard about his situation from a mutual friend and phoned to say that ECT had saved his own life decades earlier. Although he returned, in 2010, for another stint in the institute, Antrim writes of his life, in between and presently, as healthy. Slim yet formidable, a mind-bendingly good read. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
