Wednesday, August 19, 2009
West Ashley Branch Library September Book Discussion Date Changed
Please note that the date for the September Not Fiction Book Discussion of Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg at West Ashley Branch Library has been changed to Thursday, September 10, at 11:00 a.m. It was originally scheduled for Thursday, September 17.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
September Not Fiction Book Discussions
As summer comes to a close, we will 
consider mental illness and the way it can throw a family into crisis with Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg, the story of the summer that Greenberg's fifteen-year-old daughter Sally was diagnosed with bipolar mania, "struck mad," as Greenberg says in the first line of this personal yet philosophical memoir.
In addition to the searingly honest portrayal of his own family's response to Sally's illness, including his experience taking a dose of Sally's medication so that he could better understand what she might be experiencing, Greenberg also describes the rich cast of characters at the Manhattan psychiatric ward where Sally spent much of that summer, including other patients and their families and the hospital doctors and staff. On his website, http://www.michaelgreenberg.org/, Greenberg describes his motivations for writing the book, suggesting that he felt it important to share the point of view of the family of a person who suffers from mental illness. He says, "I remembered the trepidation with which I started the book several years ago. I wrote about 60 pages and decided not to go on: it seemed gauche to reveal our lives in such a public manner. I put the pages away, but a year later removed them from their drawer and continued writing. It struck me that this book was missing from the rich literature of madness--a literature that begins with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy back in the early 17th century, and trots forward to Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, William Styron's Darkness Visible, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind . . . Every one of these writers was describing his or her own experience of being psychotic. But apart from clinicians and specialists, very few have written about it from the other shore. There was a conspicuous gap in the literature, which I realized needed to be filled. For better or for worse, this is what I set out to do with Hurry Down Sunshine."
Greenberg also explores mental illness from a philosophical point of view, that of the self in crisis, the line between personality and pathology, inspiration and illness, and he raises questions about the way we as a culture view and respond to mental illness.
We hope you will join one of our discussions: Tuesday, September 1, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 10, at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch Library (please note the date change--this discussion was originally scheduled for September 17); or here on the blog.
consider mental illness and the way it can throw a family into crisis with Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg, the story of the summer that Greenberg's fifteen-year-old daughter Sally was diagnosed with bipolar mania, "struck mad," as Greenberg says in the first line of this personal yet philosophical memoir.In addition to the searingly honest portrayal of his own family's response to Sally's illness, including his experience taking a dose of Sally's medication so that he could better understand what she might be experiencing, Greenberg also describes the rich cast of characters at the Manhattan psychiatric ward where Sally spent much of that summer, including other patients and their families and the hospital doctors and staff. On his website, http://www.michaelgreenberg.org/, Greenberg describes his motivations for writing the book, suggesting that he felt it important to share the point of view of the family of a person who suffers from mental illness. He says, "I remembered the trepidation with which I started the book several years ago. I wrote about 60 pages and decided not to go on: it seemed gauche to reveal our lives in such a public manner. I put the pages away, but a year later removed them from their drawer and continued writing. It struck me that this book was missing from the rich literature of madness--a literature that begins with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy back in the early 17th century, and trots forward to Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, William Styron's Darkness Visible, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind . . . Every one of these writers was describing his or her own experience of being psychotic. But apart from clinicians and specialists, very few have written about it from the other shore. There was a conspicuous gap in the literature, which I realized needed to be filled. For better or for worse, this is what I set out to do with Hurry Down Sunshine."
Greenberg also explores mental illness from a philosophical point of view, that of the self in crisis, the line between personality and pathology, inspiration and illness, and he raises questions about the way we as a culture view and respond to mental illness.
We hope you will join one of our discussions: Tuesday, September 1, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 10, at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch Library (please note the date change--this discussion was originally scheduled for September 17); or here on the blog.
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