I got an email a few of weeks ago asking if I’d like to review a book called Hurry Down Sunshine written by a dad about his daughter’s first manic episode. I thought the book sounded interesting, and since I love to read and they were willing to send me a copy, I figured I’d go for it, even though I had some reservations about the possible handling of the topic.

You see, even though I love to read, I was actually prepared to dislike the book. I didn’t think much of the idea of what someone from the outside thought about manic craziness. Particularly in his daughter Sally. I was afraid of a ton of sappiness and a lot of excuses.  I was surprised, though. Yes, Michael Greenberg quite obviously loves his daughter, but sappy isn’t a word I can apply to his writing. And excuses weren’t there.

It took me 3 days to read the book from cover to cover, because I dropped everything when I got hooked in the first chapters. I forgot about the sci fi I had been reading to devour Hurry Down Sunshine. It’s is a well written book peering into a severe manic episode and how it affected a family over a 15 year old’s summer. Every person in it is easy to see and feel and relate to. I’ve always wondered what bipolar mania really looks and feels like from the outside, and now I know. It’s haunting and beautiful and draws me at the same time. I’ll no doubt read it again.

Why I Wrote Hurry Down Sunshine

By Michael Greenberg 
Author of Hurry Down Sunshine

It was with a feeling of trepidation that I first sat down to write Hurry Down Sunshine. I don’t think of myself as a memoirist in the usual sense of the word, andHurry Down Sunshine is not about my childhood or my “awakening” or the “turning points” in my life. It’s about a dramatic event that took place in the time-span of a single summer, when my daughter Sally, at the age of fifteen, had a manic breakdown.

After writing about sixty pages, I decided not to go on. The subject felt too private and revealing. It seemed gauche, and possibly unethical, to expose myself and the people closest to me in such a public manner.

I put the pages away, but the events of that summer had a haunting impact on us, and after about a year I removed the unfinished manuscript from its drawer and started writing again. One of the reasons I forged ahead was that I felt this book was missing from the literature of madness. And a brilliant literature it is: one that begins with Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy back in the early seventeenth century; trots forward to William James’ Principles of Psychology, which is much more of a personal confession of James’ own mood disorder than the title suggests; moves on to Robert Lowell’s extraordinary poems from the psych ward during his manic attacks; Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar; William Styrons’s Darkness Visible; Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind . . . 

What these writers have in common is that every one of them was describing his or her own experience of being psychotic. Hurry Down Sunshine was the chance to fill a missing link, to write about madness as a participant, but from the other shore. To the family and to the sufferer, psychosis brings a tremendous feeling of loneliness in its wake, and sometimes a feeling of shame. My hope was to write a book that would offer some companionship to people who have been through a similar experience — with a child, a parent, a spouse, a close friend, a sibling. 

With only a few weeks to go before publication, I sent a copy of Hurry Down Sunshine to Sally, twenty-seven now and living in Vermont. With growing anxiety, I had been putting this off. Sally had asked me to use her real name in the memoir, but that was without her knowing its contents. To harm her was the furthest thing from my mind, but in a way the very act of writing the book was a betrayal: I was exposing her psychosis, chronicling in detail what could have been painlessly left unsaid. “I’ve forgotten almost everything that happened that summer,” she told me. “Some merciful manic amnesia, I guess.” My descriptions of her — bristling uncontrollably, with her lips pressed fiercely together and her voice piercing me like a dart — were bound to throw her back to that difficult time. At worst, it could trigger a fresh manic attack.

Before putting the book in the mail, I called Sally to let her know it was on the way. “You sound scared,” she said, immediately picking up my tone of voice. This usually meant that she was frightened as well. I delivered the speech I had prepared: the memoir was a reconstruction of an event that took place twelve years ago; it wasn’t a portrait of Sally as she was now. “Some of it may disturb you,” I said. 

My warning seemed to make her more eager to read it. She would get the book in time to finish it over the weekend. “I’ll come up to Vermont on Monday, so we can talk about it, if you feel you need to,” I said. 

On Sunday night Sally called me. She had finished the book. There was no need for me to make a special trip to see her, she said. “I loved it. I felt I was reading about someone else, a fifteen-year-old girl named Sally who had been to hell and was the only one who didn’t know it. How many people get to look at themselves in such a way?”

Only then did I feel at peace with the book, able to see it go out to the world without qualms.

©2008 Michael Greenberg

Author Bio

A native New Yorker, Michael Greenberg is a columnist for the Times Literary Supplement (London), where his wide-ranging essays have been appearing since 2003. His fiction, criticism, and travel pieces have been published widely. He lives in New York with his wife and nine-year-old son.

http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781590511916

If you’re interested in seeing just what bipolar mania can look like from the outside, I recommend Hurry Down Sunshine. And no, no one paid or coerced me to give a good review of the book. All I got out of it was the book itself to read. I guess it’s kind of hard to review something you haven’t read. I enjoyed it, though, and if you really want an outside perspective, this is the book to read, I think.

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