A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of 2016
âDespair is always described as dull,â writes Daphne Merkin, âwhen the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.â This Close to HappyâMerkinâs rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depressionâcaptures this strange light.
Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls âthe inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome.â The arc of Merkinâs affliction is lifelong, beginning in a childhood largely bereft of love and stretching into the present, where Merkin lives a high-functioning life and her depression is manageable, if not âcured.â âThe opposite of depression,â she writes with characteristic insight, âis not a state of unimaginable happiness . . . but a state of relative all-right-ness.â
In this dark yet vital memoir, Merkin describes not only the harrowing sorrow that she has known all her life, but also her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that many share but few talk about, one that remains shrouded in stigma. In the words of the distinguished psychologist Carol Gilligan, âIt brings a stunningly perceptive voice into the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.â