This Close to Happy A Reckoning with Depression

Daphne Merkin, Suzanne Toren

eAudio - 2017

A gifted and audacious writer confronts her lifelong battle with depression and her search for releaseThis 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 the 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 travails of growing up in a large, affluent family where there was a paucity of love and 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.Along the way Merkin also discusses her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence... more