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This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression
A gifted and audacious writer confronts her lifelong battle with depression and her search for release
This 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 of 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 as a writer. She eventually marries, has a child, and suffers severe postpartum depression, for which she is again hospitalized. Merkin also discusses her visits to various therapists and psychopharmocologists, which enables her to probe the causes of depression and its various treatments. The book ends in the present, where the writer has learned how to navigate her depression, if not “cure” it, after a third hospitalization in the wake of her mother’s death.
This 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 of 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 as a writer. She eventually marries, has a child, and suffers severe postpartum depression, for which she is again hospitalized. Merkin also discusses her visits to various therapists and psychopharmocologists, which enables her to probe the causes of depression and its various treatments. The book ends in the present, where the writer has learned how to navigate her depression, if not “cure” it, after a third hospitalization in the wake of her mother’s death.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published February 7, 2017
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4115 people want to read
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March 9, 2017
There are a few parts throughout that speak well to the more universal aspects of deep depression but, for the most part, this book will be unrelatable to 99% of the people who read it even if they are familiar with the clawing despair and stone-like immobility of the depressive state. Overall, this book made me angry.
This is the latest in a line of books written by rich people suffering from a horrible illness with all the help of modern society open to them and all the time and flexibility to make use of that help due to their upper class status. I keep getting the feeling that publishing, like much of society, is now so firmly entrenched in the echo chamber of the elitists that they fail to recognize the limitations and scant relatability of these so-called universal memoirs and confessionals that they continue to produce all the while ignoring the actual realities of the vast majority of society.
The depressed people who aren't rich enough to get the help they need, who don't have the flexibility to work through their ever-deepening dark states from their beds without the threat of losing the job that's barely keeping them and their families alive aren't writing books about their experiences...they are either suffering silently with little to no help, self-medicating with alcohol and drugs, or they are, quite simply, dead. Where are their stories?
This is the latest in a line of books written by rich people suffering from a horrible illness with all the help of modern society open to them and all the time and flexibility to make use of that help due to their upper class status. I keep getting the feeling that publishing, like much of society, is now so firmly entrenched in the echo chamber of the elitists that they fail to recognize the limitations and scant relatability of these so-called universal memoirs and confessionals that they continue to produce all the while ignoring the actual realities of the vast majority of society.
The depressed people who aren't rich enough to get the help they need, who don't have the flexibility to work through their ever-deepening dark states from their beds without the threat of losing the job that's barely keeping them and their families alive aren't writing books about their experiences...they are either suffering silently with little to no help, self-medicating with alcohol and drugs, or they are, quite simply, dead. Where are their stories?
August 9, 2017
"Perhaps depressives expect too much of life when they're not feeling depressed, have too exalted an idea of what the standard is."I haven't been very active around these parts lately, for a couple of reasons. One is that my husband and I moved to a new apartment in a new neighborhood in town, and just the simple fact that I've been packing and unpacking and organizing has made it hard to sit down and finish a book and write thoughtful things about it.
But, really, the main reason I've been kind of quiet online the last month or so is that my mental health hasn't been so hot lately. My anxiety's been cruising at a high altitude for the last year, eighteen months or so. While I've struggled and while I've thrown a lot of mental energy into dealing with that, I've been able to get by in something approximating a regular routine. At some point, the anxiety started to transform into a lot of sadness and that makes it harder to do the getting by. The mental energy needed to deal with that is, for me, considerably more exhausting, more draining, and little gets left behind for routine or what you might call leisure activities. In my case, that's the reading and writing about reading, and thus the lack of activity around these parts.
Anyway, I don't want to bog anyone down in overly personal details, but I picked this book up from the library because the marketing copy sounded like it was a meditation on some things that I've been trying to work on lately. And it didn't really offer that, which was mildly disappointing, but it's still a lovely if occasionally overly academicy piece of writing that describes what it's like to be trapped with your head under the waters of depression. It might have resonated more with me, personally, if I'd read select chapters as essays instead of the book as a whole. I was really hoping for more of a "turning point" that I could connect to, and I felt like that was kind of lacking. But it did inspire me to start doing some writing of my own on similar topics (and to think about maybe sharing them, if that's anything anyone would ever be interested in reading.)
March 15, 2017
I’m torn about this book. I am 55 years old and have been suffering with one or another form of depression since I hit puberty, and although I did talk-therapy three times, for about a year each time, I resisted medication until thirty days ago.
My life has changed. My favorite effect — so far — is the medication seems to serve as a sort of editor or inhibitor of the “bad voices” — not that I am schizophrenic, but, rather, in the internal monologue always and forever going on, the darkest mutterings and urges of the doom and gloom voice have been silenced. Since I was twelve I have been hearing in the narration of my life: “And then, he died.” I have wished for forty years — sometimes far more urgently than others, but always there — to die, to be finished with this life, to be over. That feeling is gone. Better yet, the habit of thinking negatively and expecting the worst has been interrupted, and when it occurs it is actively — though kindly — questioned. So, when I start to think in those old patterns in which I want to say or project something ugly or dire, the Charlie who existed when I was MUCH MUCH younger speaks up. The little boy Charlie who believed the world was safe and everyone love him, that smiling child in photos, he steps in before I can submerge myself and near-drown in sorrow. He says, “Wait a minute, the world is a good place, don’t give your energy to the monsters.” It isn’t so much that I am dancing on the ceiling in a near manic relief like I did in the past when my dysthymia retreated for a bit — as it regularly did — but, rather, I am not having the soar and sink syndrome; I am even, steady, unafraid (mostly), and alive in a way I have not been in so long that it is as if I am meeting myself anew. I have managed to wake up the young, smiling me and bring him along into adulthood. It’s a wonderful thing and I am very lucky because I know the meds do not work for everyone, and many people struggle to find the right ones. AND, even if this is a placebo effect, if I’m imagining it — I don’t care. It feels miraculous and safe and how I got here is irrelevant.
Daphne Merkin’s experience with depression was — is — far worse than mine and perhaps it was too early in my recovery to read about someone else’s journey? There were certainly passages that resonated with me to such a degree I had to read through them very quickly, not allow them to take too much hold. Also, there were some horrifying stories which were far different from my experiences. Her parents were emotionally abusive whereas I was much loved and held close by my family; my childhood trauma came from a world unkind to girly-boys and the internal struggle I fought knowing from a very young age that I was not what society wanted a boy to be.
Still, whatever the reason, my brain and body reacted to life in ways inclined toward sorrow and fear and withdraw. Too, my pain and anger and melancholy were difficult for others to understand. Daphne Merkin’s refers to Victorian poet and likely sufferer of bipolar depression, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Spring and Fall, which happens to have always been one of my favorite pieces:
Spring and Fall
To a young child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
And she says, about it and about her:
Sometimes, when I wonder why this blackness got started so early and why it has stayed around for so long, it seems to me it would have helped to look on myself as a kind of Margaret grieving for the end that awaits us all — to have that sort of elegiac perspective. As it was, I grieved over everything indiscriminately and no one ever inquired into it. “You like to be sad,” my mother frequently said to me, with her usual Germanic lack of sentiment. As though it were a choice. Hopkins would have understood, I am sure of it.
Yes. That. I did not understand my sadness, I felt guilty about it, I believed it was my failure of thought and attitude, a sin I was committing against myself, that I was ungrateful and wasting the blessings bestowed upon me by a higher power (when I still believed in a higher power), and I ought be able to pull myself together. So I tried. And I hid my depression, as much and for as long as I could. But, like Daphne Merkin being judged by her mother as preferring sadness, I can vividly recall speaking to a dear friend during a period in my life when things were going well; I had gotten some things of which I’d long dreamed, an achievement which caused anxiety based in the fear of losing those moments, knowing they would end, the sorrow of not being good enough to maintain these joys, and so I was panicking because I was undeserving of happiness. I had to look for the dark side — doing what I always did, that self-flagellating, emotional S&M, where all pleasure must be accompanied by punishment and pain. My dear, long-suffering friend who wanted only good things for me and for me to be able to enjoy them, said; “I don’t know what to tell you anymore, you just won’t let yourself be happy, you want to be miserable.”
No. I didn’t. I don’t. But it was what I had known since I was an adolescent and because of it I cultivated a dark view of reality and the world. It was part of the fabric of my emotional DNA. So, this from Daphne Merkin also rang a bell:
Still, it was hard for me to agree to try medication for something that seemed so intrinsic to who I was — not something out there, like having a case of the measles, but the state of mind in which I lived, so to speak, however negatively.
That. I didn’t want to be miserable, but with years of practice and needing some way to make it through the days and the downs and the voice insisting I and everyone else would be better off if I would just go ahead and die, I had come to justify my sorrow as being the only sane response to a world full of hate and suffering and ignorance. To me, people who were happy were the ones who had a problem. I had to believe that, because I believed my sorrow was something I could not escape any more than I could not be gay, not be male, not be white, not be Charlie who cried at everything and was only happy when he was alone with a book or on stage singing a song. Believing my sorrow was normal was a necessary survival technique in the circumstances in which I lived.
Daphne Merkin’s sorrows were many times larger than mine. She was hospitalized repeatedly when suicidal. She has been in talk therapy and tried many combinations of drugs and treatments to find a way to sustain herself. Yet, she managed to be an accomplished writer and mother. She found a way, she lived a life. As did I.
I wonder, had I had the financial and social advantages she had, would my suffering have taken a different shape? I would not have been any less depressed — I don’t think — but had I lived in a world where psychiatrists and drugs were within my reach, or had an upbringing absent the philosophy of “get it together, you’re not that sick,” or been born in an age and location where being gay was not itself considered something of which I needed to be cured, a fact which made me terrified in my youth of speaking about it to anyone in authority, or, had hospitalization ever been an option, would I have been gentled into drugs and treatment earlier?
Such pondering about the availability of treatment and living in a world supportive of who you are makes me all the more outraged at the GOP and current administration’s decimation of the health care system and pushback on the gains in equality hard-won for the LGBTQ community. The people who have treasonously and deceptively gained control of the government are heartless, soulless monsters, evil to the core, and I hold them responsible for the suicides and sorrows and bashings of LGBTQ and immigrant youth, the unpunished abuse and rapes of women (and, to a much lesser degree, men, usually at risk men), and policies which encourage the hunting of people of color, Muslims, Jews, women, LGBTQ, and on and on. We’ve gone backward in time, somehow, and I cannot fathom the number of people who will be damaged, who will die — not JUST because of the policies, but because of the poisonous atmosphere and culture being encouraged by these hateful republicans and their alt-right, hetero-white-male armies of ignoramuses and idiot malcontents.
And, if you’ve made it this far, you will understand my issue with Daphne Merkin’s memoir of depression, because having read this you will probably have said at least once, “Too much about him, so self-indulgent,” or thought, “This is too close to home, I’d rather not be reminded of feeling this way,” or felt, “Oh please, get to the point and hurry it up,” and likely some measure of, “Damn, I’m sorry you had to go through this but I don’t want to be going through it with you. I’ve my own crap to sort.” And then, finally, if I’ve done any part of my job — and Daphne Merkin certainly has accomplished this, you’ll have a moment of relief, the exhale of, “Thank you for sharing this, revealing yourself, and letting me know I am not alone.”
You aren’t, my friend. None of us are. And if talking about it, sharing our lives and thoughts helps one person (like me) to say yes to medication or to have the impetus to hang on for another day, if even a hint of hope and faith are conjured, well then, that’s enough.
My life has changed. My favorite effect — so far — is the medication seems to serve as a sort of editor or inhibitor of the “bad voices” — not that I am schizophrenic, but, rather, in the internal monologue always and forever going on, the darkest mutterings and urges of the doom and gloom voice have been silenced. Since I was twelve I have been hearing in the narration of my life: “And then, he died.” I have wished for forty years — sometimes far more urgently than others, but always there — to die, to be finished with this life, to be over. That feeling is gone. Better yet, the habit of thinking negatively and expecting the worst has been interrupted, and when it occurs it is actively — though kindly — questioned. So, when I start to think in those old patterns in which I want to say or project something ugly or dire, the Charlie who existed when I was MUCH MUCH younger speaks up. The little boy Charlie who believed the world was safe and everyone love him, that smiling child in photos, he steps in before I can submerge myself and near-drown in sorrow. He says, “Wait a minute, the world is a good place, don’t give your energy to the monsters.” It isn’t so much that I am dancing on the ceiling in a near manic relief like I did in the past when my dysthymia retreated for a bit — as it regularly did — but, rather, I am not having the soar and sink syndrome; I am even, steady, unafraid (mostly), and alive in a way I have not been in so long that it is as if I am meeting myself anew. I have managed to wake up the young, smiling me and bring him along into adulthood. It’s a wonderful thing and I am very lucky because I know the meds do not work for everyone, and many people struggle to find the right ones. AND, even if this is a placebo effect, if I’m imagining it — I don’t care. It feels miraculous and safe and how I got here is irrelevant.
Daphne Merkin’s experience with depression was — is — far worse than mine and perhaps it was too early in my recovery to read about someone else’s journey? There were certainly passages that resonated with me to such a degree I had to read through them very quickly, not allow them to take too much hold. Also, there were some horrifying stories which were far different from my experiences. Her parents were emotionally abusive whereas I was much loved and held close by my family; my childhood trauma came from a world unkind to girly-boys and the internal struggle I fought knowing from a very young age that I was not what society wanted a boy to be.
Still, whatever the reason, my brain and body reacted to life in ways inclined toward sorrow and fear and withdraw. Too, my pain and anger and melancholy were difficult for others to understand. Daphne Merkin’s refers to Victorian poet and likely sufferer of bipolar depression, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Spring and Fall, which happens to have always been one of my favorite pieces:
Spring and Fall
To a young child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
And she says, about it and about her:
Sometimes, when I wonder why this blackness got started so early and why it has stayed around for so long, it seems to me it would have helped to look on myself as a kind of Margaret grieving for the end that awaits us all — to have that sort of elegiac perspective. As it was, I grieved over everything indiscriminately and no one ever inquired into it. “You like to be sad,” my mother frequently said to me, with her usual Germanic lack of sentiment. As though it were a choice. Hopkins would have understood, I am sure of it.
Yes. That. I did not understand my sadness, I felt guilty about it, I believed it was my failure of thought and attitude, a sin I was committing against myself, that I was ungrateful and wasting the blessings bestowed upon me by a higher power (when I still believed in a higher power), and I ought be able to pull myself together. So I tried. And I hid my depression, as much and for as long as I could. But, like Daphne Merkin being judged by her mother as preferring sadness, I can vividly recall speaking to a dear friend during a period in my life when things were going well; I had gotten some things of which I’d long dreamed, an achievement which caused anxiety based in the fear of losing those moments, knowing they would end, the sorrow of not being good enough to maintain these joys, and so I was panicking because I was undeserving of happiness. I had to look for the dark side — doing what I always did, that self-flagellating, emotional S&M, where all pleasure must be accompanied by punishment and pain. My dear, long-suffering friend who wanted only good things for me and for me to be able to enjoy them, said; “I don’t know what to tell you anymore, you just won’t let yourself be happy, you want to be miserable.”
No. I didn’t. I don’t. But it was what I had known since I was an adolescent and because of it I cultivated a dark view of reality and the world. It was part of the fabric of my emotional DNA. So, this from Daphne Merkin also rang a bell:
Still, it was hard for me to agree to try medication for something that seemed so intrinsic to who I was — not something out there, like having a case of the measles, but the state of mind in which I lived, so to speak, however negatively.
That. I didn’t want to be miserable, but with years of practice and needing some way to make it through the days and the downs and the voice insisting I and everyone else would be better off if I would just go ahead and die, I had come to justify my sorrow as being the only sane response to a world full of hate and suffering and ignorance. To me, people who were happy were the ones who had a problem. I had to believe that, because I believed my sorrow was something I could not escape any more than I could not be gay, not be male, not be white, not be Charlie who cried at everything and was only happy when he was alone with a book or on stage singing a song. Believing my sorrow was normal was a necessary survival technique in the circumstances in which I lived.
Daphne Merkin’s sorrows were many times larger than mine. She was hospitalized repeatedly when suicidal. She has been in talk therapy and tried many combinations of drugs and treatments to find a way to sustain herself. Yet, she managed to be an accomplished writer and mother. She found a way, she lived a life. As did I.
I wonder, had I had the financial and social advantages she had, would my suffering have taken a different shape? I would not have been any less depressed — I don’t think — but had I lived in a world where psychiatrists and drugs were within my reach, or had an upbringing absent the philosophy of “get it together, you’re not that sick,” or been born in an age and location where being gay was not itself considered something of which I needed to be cured, a fact which made me terrified in my youth of speaking about it to anyone in authority, or, had hospitalization ever been an option, would I have been gentled into drugs and treatment earlier?
Such pondering about the availability of treatment and living in a world supportive of who you are makes me all the more outraged at the GOP and current administration’s decimation of the health care system and pushback on the gains in equality hard-won for the LGBTQ community. The people who have treasonously and deceptively gained control of the government are heartless, soulless monsters, evil to the core, and I hold them responsible for the suicides and sorrows and bashings of LGBTQ and immigrant youth, the unpunished abuse and rapes of women (and, to a much lesser degree, men, usually at risk men), and policies which encourage the hunting of people of color, Muslims, Jews, women, LGBTQ, and on and on. We’ve gone backward in time, somehow, and I cannot fathom the number of people who will be damaged, who will die — not JUST because of the policies, but because of the poisonous atmosphere and culture being encouraged by these hateful republicans and their alt-right, hetero-white-male armies of ignoramuses and idiot malcontents.
And, if you’ve made it this far, you will understand my issue with Daphne Merkin’s memoir of depression, because having read this you will probably have said at least once, “Too much about him, so self-indulgent,” or thought, “This is too close to home, I’d rather not be reminded of feeling this way,” or felt, “Oh please, get to the point and hurry it up,” and likely some measure of, “Damn, I’m sorry you had to go through this but I don’t want to be going through it with you. I’ve my own crap to sort.” And then, finally, if I’ve done any part of my job — and Daphne Merkin certainly has accomplished this, you’ll have a moment of relief, the exhale of, “Thank you for sharing this, revealing yourself, and letting me know I am not alone.”
You aren’t, my friend. None of us are. And if talking about it, sharing our lives and thoughts helps one person (like me) to say yes to medication or to have the impetus to hang on for another day, if even a hint of hope and faith are conjured, well then, that’s enough.
July 2, 2020
“One of the most intolerable aspects of depression is the way it insinuates itself everywhere in your life, casting a pall not only over the present but the past and the future as well, suggesting nothing but its own inevitability. For the fact is that the quiet terror of severe depression never entirely passes once you’ve experienced it. It hovers behind the scenes, placated temporarily by medication and a willed effort at functioning, waiting to slither back in. It sits in the space behind your eyes, making its presence felt even in those moments when other, lighter matters are at the forefront of your mind. It tugs at your awareness, keeping you from ever being fully in the present.”
March 2, 2017
meh. more aptly titled: "not at all close to happy: a reckoning with my sick mother."
April 10, 2017
This is one of those "I really wanted and tried to like it" books. Merkin is a thoughtful descriptive writer and begins by making a pretty strong case for why there need to be more women writing about depression. A good start, I thought. For me, however, the problem was that the book is really more an intimately detailed memoir of a truly dysfunctional -- though materially very privileged -- upbringing. I wanted to know much, much less about the daily schedule and personality of the author's abusive European nanny and much more about how she thinks about and tries to make sense of her depression as an adult. Yes, there do need to be more accounts of women dealing with depression -- that of themselves and those close to them-- in order to help us understand how depression is experienced and, hopefully, make us all a bit more empathetic. I don't require a happy ending or tale of triumph, but I do want some sense of understanding. I didn't find this to be especially helpful or insightful.
February 22, 2017
Let's see. This is not a happy book, despite the word in the title. I'd din't really expect it to be, either. I stumbled across an excerpt in one of the magazines I read -- Harper's, maybe -- from early in the book, when Merkin first addresses suicide. There was a certain frankness to it, an honesty about death wishes that you seldom find, that enthralled me, so I picked this up and started to read it.
Sadly, the whole book didn't have the same allure. There is more candid talk of suicide, and a very interesting book-length discussion of nature vs. nurture, particularly its relation to depression. This stems from Merkin's belief that her depression is largely due to her incredibly dysfunctional childhood... but she never quite decides if it's that, the chemicals in her brain, or a little bit of both.
But she spends a whole lot of time talking about her childhood -- I didn't measure, but I'd venture a guess that more than half the words are about her childhood, not her depression. This, for me, was disappointing: I don't particularly like memoirs about sad childhoods, and I wasn't really expecting that with this. It becomes a bit indulgent (Do memoirs ever not, though?)
The book has other flaws. I mentioned I found this through an excerpt, and it feels almost as if Merkin -- who made her name writing columns -- wrote this with the intention of excerpting it. Lots of information gets repeated, sometimes even the same turn of phrase, etc. And the events, too, seem redundant -- she gets really sad, she goes to a hospital, she gets okay, she leaves, she gets really sad, she goes to a hospital, she gets okay, she leaves, etc. And there's no real resolution. It's like her editor said, "Make it uplifting at the end!" and so the last page or so suddenly turns bright, largely because she writes it that way.
That's not to say, though, that the book is nothing but flaws. There are some great AHA moments, when she says something that I've felt in my own struggle with depression and have always wondered if that was just me. (There's a particularly great section towards the end when she talks about how hard it is for her to comprehend how people go on being alive when they aren't in her immediate vicinity.)
I've already written too much! The point, though, is if you want to read someone's experience with depression, this is a good place to start, but be prepared for a lot of rough childhood stories and, at times, a bit of oversharing. (The dream she has of her mother -- and her reaction to it! -- still haunt me!)
Sadly, the whole book didn't have the same allure. There is more candid talk of suicide, and a very interesting book-length discussion of nature vs. nurture, particularly its relation to depression. This stems from Merkin's belief that her depression is largely due to her incredibly dysfunctional childhood... but she never quite decides if it's that, the chemicals in her brain, or a little bit of both.
But she spends a whole lot of time talking about her childhood -- I didn't measure, but I'd venture a guess that more than half the words are about her childhood, not her depression. This, for me, was disappointing: I don't particularly like memoirs about sad childhoods, and I wasn't really expecting that with this. It becomes a bit indulgent (Do memoirs ever not, though?)
The book has other flaws. I mentioned I found this through an excerpt, and it feels almost as if Merkin -- who made her name writing columns -- wrote this with the intention of excerpting it. Lots of information gets repeated, sometimes even the same turn of phrase, etc. And the events, too, seem redundant -- she gets really sad, she goes to a hospital, she gets okay, she leaves, she gets really sad, she goes to a hospital, she gets okay, she leaves, etc. And there's no real resolution. It's like her editor said, "Make it uplifting at the end!" and so the last page or so suddenly turns bright, largely because she writes it that way.
That's not to say, though, that the book is nothing but flaws. There are some great AHA moments, when she says something that I've felt in my own struggle with depression and have always wondered if that was just me. (There's a particularly great section towards the end when she talks about how hard it is for her to comprehend how people go on being alive when they aren't in her immediate vicinity.)
I've already written too much! The point, though, is if you want to read someone's experience with depression, this is a good place to start, but be prepared for a lot of rough childhood stories and, at times, a bit of oversharing. (The dream she has of her mother -- and her reaction to it! -- still haunt me!)
August 15, 2017
I really struggled when rating this book. There were parts that I think were a 5 and others that were more of a 2 so I’m splitting the difference and going with a 3. This is a really interesting account of clinical depression. There is a lot of pain expressed in this book. It’s not always easy to read. And as someone who suffers from major depression, I found myself relating to much of this book. It can definitely give the reader some visibility into the air of despair and immobility that is so key to understanding depression. The childhood of Daphne Merkin is also explored in this novel and I found her relationship with her parents and siblings to be fascinating and horrifying. This memoir is definitely raw and unflinching. She does not hesitate to be real and honest about the good and bad of her life with depression. Merkin’s experiences were very different from my own but it was interesting to see her experience through the prism of the financial and social advantages that she had in her life. As for my critique of the novel … at times the book felt pretty self-indulgent. It seemed at times to go to the same places over and over, not covering new ground. And perhaps that’s the point – depression goes to the same places over and over? There were times that the book felt bogged down and I found it to move very slowly. But, overall, I’m glad that I read it. I think it’s a good addition to the depression memoir as it, if nothing else, can remind us that we’re not alone in our struggles.
March 12, 2017
I did not finish this book as I found it too upsetting to read. While I am sympathetic to Merkin's depression and understand the illness as I face periods of it, as do close loved ones, I found the story to be self-serving. Her sadness is so grand, so much so that the desire to kill herself never leaves the page, ever. It is what drew me into the book from the first page but it never went away. Not when her nanny beat her and her siblings as a child, not when her parents emotionally abused her and her siblings, not when she felt anxious getting married because 'she wouldn't belong to her mother anymore', and not when her mother passed away and she dreamt her mother was alive--with penis--and had sex with her. The revealing nature of this book is what I loved about it in the beginning and it is also what pushed me away.
It was that and few other details of her life. Put out by the super intellectual, respected, beloved publisher I used to be an intern for (FSG) and reviewed in highbrow publications for publicity, Merkin would go on to describe something like Guy Fieri's show 'Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives' as if the reader had never heard of it before and tell people something was playing out like a 'Six Feet Under' fantasy with no acknowledgement to the TV show--no description, no explanation of what it's about, no nothing. Merkin was willing to over-explain and describe something that is a cultural phenomenon to many Americans (Fieri) but also considered lowbrow and middle-America, and gloss over terms used by book reviewers and book editors (like she used to be). I found this distracting because it treats the reader like an idiot. (This criticism does not mean to be anti-intellectual, as there is value in everything because we teach ourselves about the world in order to learn about ourselves. There just was not a fair treatment of material here, which, as a writer, seems truly silly.)
Merkin's depression first inspired me: 'look at this woman willing to tell this story of extreme personal darkness' I first thought. But then it slowly shoved me into a pool and I sank like a stone with every conversation she had with her mother about masturbation and every threat of stabbing herself.
As a reader, I could not journey into the darkness, or to the end. I got thirty pages from it, flipped forward to find out she's still sad in the last line, and happily closed the book for good.
It was that and few other details of her life. Put out by the super intellectual, respected, beloved publisher I used to be an intern for (FSG) and reviewed in highbrow publications for publicity, Merkin would go on to describe something like Guy Fieri's show 'Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives' as if the reader had never heard of it before and tell people something was playing out like a 'Six Feet Under' fantasy with no acknowledgement to the TV show--no description, no explanation of what it's about, no nothing. Merkin was willing to over-explain and describe something that is a cultural phenomenon to many Americans (Fieri) but also considered lowbrow and middle-America, and gloss over terms used by book reviewers and book editors (like she used to be). I found this distracting because it treats the reader like an idiot. (This criticism does not mean to be anti-intellectual, as there is value in everything because we teach ourselves about the world in order to learn about ourselves. There just was not a fair treatment of material here, which, as a writer, seems truly silly.)
Merkin's depression first inspired me: 'look at this woman willing to tell this story of extreme personal darkness' I first thought. But then it slowly shoved me into a pool and I sank like a stone with every conversation she had with her mother about masturbation and every threat of stabbing herself.
As a reader, I could not journey into the darkness, or to the end. I got thirty pages from it, flipped forward to find out she's still sad in the last line, and happily closed the book for good.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 24, 2017
I was completely riveted by Merkin's "reckoning with depression," which also felt like a reckoning with life itself. The author successfully jumps forward and backward through time, weaving a personal history of depression that is at once nuanced and straightforward. I've never read a personal accounting of depression that so clearly paints a picture of what it's like to exist within its walls. As the best memoirists do, whether you have struggled with depression or not, Merkin manages to find universal truths in her very personal story. I also appreciate the hopeful, life-affirming note she ends the book on. In short, I loved it.
September 20, 2017
As much a memoir of a tangled mother-daughter relationship as it is one of depression, this book captivated me with its unflinching look at the author's journey in and out of major depressive episodes. Merkin is a terrific writer and an erudite person who applies rigor and curiosity to her examination of her illness and its nature vs. nurture roots. A weighty contribution to the literature of mental illness.
August 8, 2017
Those who know me know I'm not a fan of most memoirs. Especially ones that belabor the I-had-it-so-bad gong without much to back it up in hard knocks and/or decent writing. My closest friends and family also know that for a time I struggled with depression, especially in my 20s and 30s. And that one way to wind me up is to wonder why "sad" people simply don't do something fun or "take a walk." Arrrggh!
Daphne Merkin's memoir, THIS CLOSE TO HAPPY, could have gone either way for me. Fortunately, Merkin is a seasoned and talented writer. And despite a comfortable upper class upbringing, she did have a difficult childhood. (An aside: I've been annoyed by reviewers who point out that Merkin had resources that other people suffering from mental illness don't. True, but in that vein only disadvantaged sufferers are allowed to discuss their depression. The rest should just shut up and suffer in silence, no matter how helpful to others their memoirs and public writings may be?) Saying her parents were cold and uninvolved is gilding the lily and Merkin first began experiencing serious symptoms of mental illness when she was in elementary school.
Merkin's book isn't always linear and at times I felt she dropped the ball and left me with unanswered questions. But her anguish, her self-doubt, her desperate desire to be "happy" are discussed with such passion that it's hard not to get caught up.
She also acts as something of a detective attempting to figure out why depression is still such a touchy subject. Is it, she asks, because of "...depression's very failure to fit into a neat, easily recognizable category..."? And early in the book she makes a point that shook me with an "aha" moment of recognition: men who suffer from depression and write about it (think DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron) often point the finger at some outside event as in instigator or reason for their illness, "by insisting on a force outside themselves" while women "tend to take onwership of the condition of depression....."
This wasn't a perfect memoir by any means. It dragged at times and readers who haven't walked this path could understandably throw up their hands. So again I come back to Merkin's writing chops. Her ability to completely bare her soul and her anguish with tight language and structure made this a worthwhile read. By the end I was as grateful as she is that "therapy saved me life." It would be a shame to lose her and I hope she continues to honor the quote she takes from John Berryman from "Eleven Addresses to the Lord:" "I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning."
Highly recommended especially for readers who loved THE BELL JAR by Sylvia Plath; DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron; and WENDY AND THE LOST BOYS by Wendy Wasserstein.
Daphne Merkin's memoir, THIS CLOSE TO HAPPY, could have gone either way for me. Fortunately, Merkin is a seasoned and talented writer. And despite a comfortable upper class upbringing, she did have a difficult childhood. (An aside: I've been annoyed by reviewers who point out that Merkin had resources that other people suffering from mental illness don't. True, but in that vein only disadvantaged sufferers are allowed to discuss their depression. The rest should just shut up and suffer in silence, no matter how helpful to others their memoirs and public writings may be?) Saying her parents were cold and uninvolved is gilding the lily and Merkin first began experiencing serious symptoms of mental illness when she was in elementary school.
Merkin's book isn't always linear and at times I felt she dropped the ball and left me with unanswered questions. But her anguish, her self-doubt, her desperate desire to be "happy" are discussed with such passion that it's hard not to get caught up.
She also acts as something of a detective attempting to figure out why depression is still such a touchy subject. Is it, she asks, because of "...depression's very failure to fit into a neat, easily recognizable category..."? And early in the book she makes a point that shook me with an "aha" moment of recognition: men who suffer from depression and write about it (think DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron) often point the finger at some outside event as in instigator or reason for their illness, "by insisting on a force outside themselves" while women "tend to take onwership of the condition of depression....."
This wasn't a perfect memoir by any means. It dragged at times and readers who haven't walked this path could understandably throw up their hands. So again I come back to Merkin's writing chops. Her ability to completely bare her soul and her anguish with tight language and structure made this a worthwhile read. By the end I was as grateful as she is that "therapy saved me life." It would be a shame to lose her and I hope she continues to honor the quote she takes from John Berryman from "Eleven Addresses to the Lord:" "I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning."
Highly recommended especially for readers who loved THE BELL JAR by Sylvia Plath; DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron; and WENDY AND THE LOST BOYS by Wendy Wasserstein.
March 4, 2017
Brilliant, scathing, heartbreaking and raw. This is the one of the most powerfully 'ordinary' and in turn honest books on depression and child abuse that I have read. Merkin's bereft childhood of brutality and lack seems to be the fertile ground that created her despondency and the tenacious, pervasive longing for suicide. Her parents appear blatantly psychologically disordered, meting out damage as casually as one would order lunch. Merkin is by turns, attached to, and repelled by, a vicious mother, who seems both stunningly narcissistic and psychopathic. I was frustrated by Merkin's struggle to detach from her mother, much in the same way that abused wives return to their abusers, expecting different outcomes; however, I understood it wholeheartedly and it is this that got so deep under my skin. I found myself preoccupied with her childhood memories, my own rising to the surface alongside them. I barely slept whilst reading this memoir, so much did it activate my own unconscious stirrings and reflections. Merkin was drowning in depression, yet repeatedly returned to her parents seeking solace, approval and a revisionist history that neither parent was emotionally equipped to provide. The repeated returns to the abusive environment only seemed to exacerbate the depression and parental control, all in a continuous self-perpetuating loop. It was the perfect demonstration of what Freud called 'the compulsion to repeat', and the 'death drive' that has and will never leave her. I rooted for Merkin to cut the toxic ties in favour of mental health and self actualisation, but her journey to contentment was more curcuitous (perhaps more realistic also). Merkin is, at turns, brutally honest with herself and the reader; sometimes clear, sometimes blind about her motives; introspective and forthright; melodramatic; and, occasionally, needy and tiresomely self-absorbed.I applaud Merkin's ability to craft riveting and beautiful prose from the wreckage and horror of her early years. This book is both difficult to read at times, and equally hard to put down.
"To be or not to be?...To die: 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished", Hamlet contemplated aloud in Shakespeare's most famous soliloquy. For Daphne Merkin it has been her lifelong preoccupation and question: to commit suicide or not? Shakespeare resolved this in 33 lines, Merkin's take is 285 pages--but both come to the same conclusion: that there is more nobility in living than there is an early death.
"To be or not to be?...To die: 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished", Hamlet contemplated aloud in Shakespeare's most famous soliloquy. For Daphne Merkin it has been her lifelong preoccupation and question: to commit suicide or not? Shakespeare resolved this in 33 lines, Merkin's take is 285 pages--but both come to the same conclusion: that there is more nobility in living than there is an early death.
April 19, 2020
Daphne Merkin's book Almost Happy is a self absorbed, cyclical diatribe against everything in this woman's life- from her stand-offish mother and spectrumy father to the anorexics she sees on her many trips to psychiatric hospitals who she envies due to the fact they get 30 minutes at the dinner table (she brushes aside the fact that 2 of them must be brought out on stretchers). Merkin obsessively ruminates over every minute aspect of her life yet engages in little to no reflective thought. Perhaps it's the superfluous amount of drugs continuously in her system or its the fact that her thoughts circulate between self pity over the fact that she had a less than perfect childhood to her you-either-have-it-or-you-don't mentally (she is the epitome of fixed mindset). Merkin's book is difficult to read and she is even more difficult to like. She acknowledges the fact that she grew up upper-middle class (how many upper-MIDDLE class families have a chef, maid, nurse, chauffer, etc.?) yet whines that her mother bought her daughter Montgomery Ward pjs rather than a designer layette- the same daughter she considered murdering a few pages before and the child she never wanted to have in the first place. She gripes that she doesn't know how to drive (a by-product of having a chauffeur your entire life), but doesn't do anything about it- a perfect microcosm of her life; has dreams her mother grows a penis and sleeps with her, and obsessively wishes for death. Reading the book was a Herculean feat without the reward. In the end Merkin learns absolutely nothing; a symbolic journey that ends exactly where she started- a little rich girl who feels sorry for herself.
November 14, 2017
This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression is, says its blurb, Daphne Merkin's 'rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression.' This Close to Happy is Merkin's fourth book, following two works of non-fiction and a novel. Memoirs and illness narratives such as this have been rather popular in recent years, and are, I feel, incredibly important tools for helping those who do not suffer with depression or linked mental illnesses to empathise with those who do. I am in the former camp in this respect, but know a lot of people who have struggled, or are struggling, with various forms of depression and anxiety, and want to ensure that I can be as well informed as to what others are going through every day as is possible.
There is still a stigma and a taboo about mental illnesses such as depression, and Merkin sees the importance of being as transparent as she can in her account, in order to show that one cannot simply 'man up' or 'pull oneself together'; depression is as serious and life-threatening a condition as a lot of physical ailments. Of this, she writes: 'In spite of our everything-goes, tell-all culture, so much of the social realm is closed against too much real personal disclosure... We live in a society that is embarrassed by interiority...'.
Merkin has been hospitalised numerous times, most poignantly in grade school for childhood depression, for the postpartum depression which she suffered when she had her daughter Zoe, and following the death of her mother, when she suffered with 'obsessive suicidal thinking'. From the very beginning, Merkin is as honest as she can possibly be about the tumultuous thoughts which tumble around in her mind on a daily basis, and the effects which this has upon her life.
Merkin continually compares herself, at least at first, to others, and how her mindset stops her from being able to cope in the world. In her introduction, she writes the following, which gives one an insight into how she sees herself, and her place within society: 'Now you can no longer figure out what it is that moves other people to bustle about out there in the world, doing errands, rushing to appointments, picking up a child from school. You have lost the thread that pulled the circumstances of your life together, nothing adds up and all you can think about is the new nerve of pain that your mind has become...'.
In the first chapter, Merkin writes of "Everywoman", describing certain scenarios and obvious reactions to them. After her creative and insightful passages which are written in this way, she posits herself, 'of course', as the person within the example which she gives, and then says, 'but she might be anyone suffering from an affliction that haunts women almost twice as much as men, even though it is, curiously, mostly men who write about it.' She goes on to say that the solidarity one finds when discovering that the "Everywoman" exists is comforting to her, as 'there is solace in the knowledge that company can be found, even in the dark.'
Merkin discusses the difficulties of diagnosing mental illnesses, honing in on her own experiences with depression when she writes the following: 'If there is something intangible about mental illness generally, depression is all the harder to define because it tends to creep in rather than announce itself, manifesting itself as an absence - of appetite, energy, sociability - rather than as a presence.' She also talks quite candidly about her experience of writing such an account, and the length of time which it took - fifteen years in all - from a publisher first asking her to put down her own actuality onto paper, following an article which she wrote for the New York Times. Her depression acted as a block in this process. 'The slaying of ghosts,' writes Merkin, 'is never easy, and my ghosts are particularly authoritative, reminding me to keep my head down and my saga to myself.'
I read This Close to Happy directly after finishing Joan Didion's Blue Nights, which deals with the death of her daughter. It proved a marvellous continuation in many ways; whilst Merkin and Didion have approached the topic of mental illness differently, and their prose styles are quite unlike one another's, the continuation of themes certainly brought some cohesion to my reading. In her introduction, as in Didion's, Merkin discusses colour and its influence upon her moods, which was one of the most striking discussions within the book for me: 'They come on, such suicidally colored periods, at times like this - I am writing this in the winter, at my desk in New York City - when the days are short, evening starts early, the sky lacks light, and you have ceased admiring your own efforts to keep going. Although they can also come on when the day is long and the light never-ending, in early spring or ripest summer.'
Merkin demonstrates, through a series of memories and reflections upon her moods, that she can never be free of her depression, despite peaks in her life, and that she can be struck by symptoms at any point, without the slightest warning. She examines her past to see whether being the child of Jewish-German immigrants of the Second World War generation altered her character, or whether she would have exhibited such feelings regardless.
This Close to Happy is not the easiest of books to read at times due to its content, but it is a determined and brave memoir, and one which I found very insightful. To conclude, I admired the way in which Merkin includes rather startling facts about depression, which she prefaces some of her own experiences with. For instance, 350 million people suffer with depression worldwide, and that, to me, is why books like this should be read by wide audiences; we all need to make an effort to understand one another in our chaotic world.
There is still a stigma and a taboo about mental illnesses such as depression, and Merkin sees the importance of being as transparent as she can in her account, in order to show that one cannot simply 'man up' or 'pull oneself together'; depression is as serious and life-threatening a condition as a lot of physical ailments. Of this, she writes: 'In spite of our everything-goes, tell-all culture, so much of the social realm is closed against too much real personal disclosure... We live in a society that is embarrassed by interiority...'.
Merkin has been hospitalised numerous times, most poignantly in grade school for childhood depression, for the postpartum depression which she suffered when she had her daughter Zoe, and following the death of her mother, when she suffered with 'obsessive suicidal thinking'. From the very beginning, Merkin is as honest as she can possibly be about the tumultuous thoughts which tumble around in her mind on a daily basis, and the effects which this has upon her life.
Merkin continually compares herself, at least at first, to others, and how her mindset stops her from being able to cope in the world. In her introduction, she writes the following, which gives one an insight into how she sees herself, and her place within society: 'Now you can no longer figure out what it is that moves other people to bustle about out there in the world, doing errands, rushing to appointments, picking up a child from school. You have lost the thread that pulled the circumstances of your life together, nothing adds up and all you can think about is the new nerve of pain that your mind has become...'.
In the first chapter, Merkin writes of "Everywoman", describing certain scenarios and obvious reactions to them. After her creative and insightful passages which are written in this way, she posits herself, 'of course', as the person within the example which she gives, and then says, 'but she might be anyone suffering from an affliction that haunts women almost twice as much as men, even though it is, curiously, mostly men who write about it.' She goes on to say that the solidarity one finds when discovering that the "Everywoman" exists is comforting to her, as 'there is solace in the knowledge that company can be found, even in the dark.'
Merkin discusses the difficulties of diagnosing mental illnesses, honing in on her own experiences with depression when she writes the following: 'If there is something intangible about mental illness generally, depression is all the harder to define because it tends to creep in rather than announce itself, manifesting itself as an absence - of appetite, energy, sociability - rather than as a presence.' She also talks quite candidly about her experience of writing such an account, and the length of time which it took - fifteen years in all - from a publisher first asking her to put down her own actuality onto paper, following an article which she wrote for the New York Times. Her depression acted as a block in this process. 'The slaying of ghosts,' writes Merkin, 'is never easy, and my ghosts are particularly authoritative, reminding me to keep my head down and my saga to myself.'
I read This Close to Happy directly after finishing Joan Didion's Blue Nights, which deals with the death of her daughter. It proved a marvellous continuation in many ways; whilst Merkin and Didion have approached the topic of mental illness differently, and their prose styles are quite unlike one another's, the continuation of themes certainly brought some cohesion to my reading. In her introduction, as in Didion's, Merkin discusses colour and its influence upon her moods, which was one of the most striking discussions within the book for me: 'They come on, such suicidally colored periods, at times like this - I am writing this in the winter, at my desk in New York City - when the days are short, evening starts early, the sky lacks light, and you have ceased admiring your own efforts to keep going. Although they can also come on when the day is long and the light never-ending, in early spring or ripest summer.'
Merkin demonstrates, through a series of memories and reflections upon her moods, that she can never be free of her depression, despite peaks in her life, and that she can be struck by symptoms at any point, without the slightest warning. She examines her past to see whether being the child of Jewish-German immigrants of the Second World War generation altered her character, or whether she would have exhibited such feelings regardless.
This Close to Happy is not the easiest of books to read at times due to its content, but it is a determined and brave memoir, and one which I found very insightful. To conclude, I admired the way in which Merkin includes rather startling facts about depression, which she prefaces some of her own experiences with. For instance, 350 million people suffer with depression worldwide, and that, to me, is why books like this should be read by wide audiences; we all need to make an effort to understand one another in our chaotic world.
February 4, 2018
I'd chosen to read this because of the ostensible subject matter, but read just a little over half of the book and then skimmed, finding myself mildly disappointed. (Note: I don't suffer from chronic depression; I'm just an interested reader.) This is really a memoir of a person who happens to have suffered from debilitating depression all her life, and not a deep exploration of/reckoning with the subject of depression itself. And that's fine. For readers who are interested in Daphne Merkin it may be of interest: she is a somewhat well-known literary critic and essayist (and notorious commenter on #MeToo), whom I find myself often disagreeing with, and I have no special loyalty to her. Also, I now find myself comparing everything I read on depression and suicidal ideation to Matt Haig's Reasons to Stay Alive, and nothing yet has described the experience as powerfully as his book.
April 10, 2017
"One of the most intolerable aspects of depression is the way it insinuates itself everywhere in your life, casting a pall not only over the present but the past and the future as well, suggesting nothing but it's own inevitability. For the fact is that the quiet terror of severe depression never entirely passes once you've experienced it. It hovers behind the scenes, placated temporarily by medication and a willed effort at functioning, waiting to slither back in."
April 5, 2017
This autobiography describes the author's lifelong battle with depression and suicidal thoughts. It is an interesting story of perseverance but provides little insight or wisdom for those who may struggle with life's difficulties.
February 26, 2017
You won't come away from this very cerebral memoir feeling happy or empowered to fight your own demons, but you won't feel alone in your battle.
December 18, 2017
I occasionally read a book about depression, thinking that it might help me through my own mild depression. But I think it only makes me depressed.
I liked the title of this one, This Close to Happy, because it feels very much like what I live through. I look around me, at my amazing life and all the ways God has blessed me, and I get frustrated with myself because I'm not happy like I should be. I feel exactly this title: I am this close to happy, so why am I not completely happy?
That title seems ludicrous for a book by Daphne Merkin, however. Merkin is light-years away from happy. According to this memoir, she almost always has been, and seems likely to continue being, about as far from happy as it is possible to be. The book's subtitle, A Reckoning with Depression, is equally inapt. This is not reckoning with depression; it's wallowing in depression. The way Merkin views the world makes my own perspective seem like rainbows and sunshine.
She occasionally writes a passage that really does explain how I feel. "One of the most intolerable aspects of depression," she writes, "is the way it insinuates itself everywhere in your life, casting a pall not only over the present but the past and the future as well, suggesting nothing but its own inevitability. . . . It hovers behind the scenes. . . . It sits in the space behind your eyes, making its presence felt even in those moments when other, lighter matters are at the forefront of your mind. It tugs at your awareness, keeping you from ever being fully in the present" (98). I understand that completely, that frustrating questioning of myself, "What is wrong with me that I can't just let myself be happy right now??"
But Merkin reveals early and often in this too-open memoir that she is fascinated by suicide. She thinks about it a lot, even down to the details of how she would do it (usually influenced by ways famous authors killed themselves; she's never far away from wanting to be part of the authors she idolizes). Chapter 3 is all about suicide. But it's ever-present in the narrative. In chapter 22, for example, Merkin says that "Sometimes, when Maria [the hired nurse for Merkin's baby], who had agreed to say on longer than planned, was out with Zoë [Merkin's baby daughter], I would take a big knife out from one of the kitchen drawers and stare at it, willing myself to plunge it into my chest" (175). Because I've never been suicidal, these moments in This Close to Happy push me further from the author.
Without a doubt, Merkin was dealt a lousy hand in life. She was raised in a very wealthy family in New York City (Manhattan's Merkin Concert Hall is named for her father), and should have had everything materially that she could ever want. Instead, she had parents who were strangely cold and distant, and a psychologically and physically abusive nanny. Oddly, the parents withheld even material comforts from their children, and Merkin remembers that there was never enough food around the house. I feel very sorry for her, and her story is an example of how even the super-rich can live in emotional poverty.
What I don't understand is how Merkin never escaped this childhood hurt at all. She had a disturbingly codependent relationship with her mother, constantly yearning for love and affection that was never there. But she is never able to move on. In entering into her story through this book, it becomes difficult to continue sympathizing with her. It's a fine balance, to be sure, but by the middle of the book I was just done feeling any sympathy for Merkin. There comes a time to grow up, move on, build a life. It seems clear to me that Merkin has been hurt by never escaping what sounds like a very intense, competitive, and artificial life among the elite in NYC. She has spent her whole life longing to be part of an inner circle that almost certainly wouldn't have been satisfying even had she been part of it (which she has been, actually). What might have happened had she moved to a town where people actually care about each other, and would have been interested in her just for who she is, scars and all?
She admits throughout the book that she has fought depression with the benefit of all the money she could ever want. And I get that being rich doesn't guarantee happiness. But at a certain point in the book, it becomes absurd how wealthy she is and what a lavish life she leads, all the while dreaming of killing herself. The book becomes an unintentional argument against the idea of wealth being concentrated in particular families. It's hard to see the Merkin family wealth as doing much to help the world, as it can't even help Merkin face everyday life, despite the many thousands of dollars she must have spent on therapy, hospitalization, medication, and leisure. Might life have been different for Merkin if it had demanded more regular work from her?
The book is also an inadvertent argument against the humanities in general. Merkin very obviously wants to be known as someone who is intimate with the "right" authors and artists. But her familiarity with literature doesn't help her. She comes across like a grad student who never moved beyond the fresh-faced academic's passion for great literature. I can't say exactly why this aspect of the book bothered me, but it really made me sad.
I picked up This Close to Happy to gain insight into depression, not to read a juicy, tell-all memoir. But it is much more the latter than the former. I can't relate to much of what it says about depression in general, and I'm uninterested in Merkin's inappropriately transparent autobiographical narrative. This book was a chore to finish, and not one I would recommend to anyone.
I liked the title of this one, This Close to Happy, because it feels very much like what I live through. I look around me, at my amazing life and all the ways God has blessed me, and I get frustrated with myself because I'm not happy like I should be. I feel exactly this title: I am this close to happy, so why am I not completely happy?
That title seems ludicrous for a book by Daphne Merkin, however. Merkin is light-years away from happy. According to this memoir, she almost always has been, and seems likely to continue being, about as far from happy as it is possible to be. The book's subtitle, A Reckoning with Depression, is equally inapt. This is not reckoning with depression; it's wallowing in depression. The way Merkin views the world makes my own perspective seem like rainbows and sunshine.
She occasionally writes a passage that really does explain how I feel. "One of the most intolerable aspects of depression," she writes, "is the way it insinuates itself everywhere in your life, casting a pall not only over the present but the past and the future as well, suggesting nothing but its own inevitability. . . . It hovers behind the scenes. . . . It sits in the space behind your eyes, making its presence felt even in those moments when other, lighter matters are at the forefront of your mind. It tugs at your awareness, keeping you from ever being fully in the present" (98). I understand that completely, that frustrating questioning of myself, "What is wrong with me that I can't just let myself be happy right now??"
But Merkin reveals early and often in this too-open memoir that she is fascinated by suicide. She thinks about it a lot, even down to the details of how she would do it (usually influenced by ways famous authors killed themselves; she's never far away from wanting to be part of the authors she idolizes). Chapter 3 is all about suicide. But it's ever-present in the narrative. In chapter 22, for example, Merkin says that "Sometimes, when Maria [the hired nurse for Merkin's baby], who had agreed to say on longer than planned, was out with Zoë [Merkin's baby daughter], I would take a big knife out from one of the kitchen drawers and stare at it, willing myself to plunge it into my chest" (175). Because I've never been suicidal, these moments in This Close to Happy push me further from the author.
Without a doubt, Merkin was dealt a lousy hand in life. She was raised in a very wealthy family in New York City (Manhattan's Merkin Concert Hall is named for her father), and should have had everything materially that she could ever want. Instead, she had parents who were strangely cold and distant, and a psychologically and physically abusive nanny. Oddly, the parents withheld even material comforts from their children, and Merkin remembers that there was never enough food around the house. I feel very sorry for her, and her story is an example of how even the super-rich can live in emotional poverty.
What I don't understand is how Merkin never escaped this childhood hurt at all. She had a disturbingly codependent relationship with her mother, constantly yearning for love and affection that was never there. But she is never able to move on. In entering into her story through this book, it becomes difficult to continue sympathizing with her. It's a fine balance, to be sure, but by the middle of the book I was just done feeling any sympathy for Merkin. There comes a time to grow up, move on, build a life. It seems clear to me that Merkin has been hurt by never escaping what sounds like a very intense, competitive, and artificial life among the elite in NYC. She has spent her whole life longing to be part of an inner circle that almost certainly wouldn't have been satisfying even had she been part of it (which she has been, actually). What might have happened had she moved to a town where people actually care about each other, and would have been interested in her just for who she is, scars and all?
She admits throughout the book that she has fought depression with the benefit of all the money she could ever want. And I get that being rich doesn't guarantee happiness. But at a certain point in the book, it becomes absurd how wealthy she is and what a lavish life she leads, all the while dreaming of killing herself. The book becomes an unintentional argument against the idea of wealth being concentrated in particular families. It's hard to see the Merkin family wealth as doing much to help the world, as it can't even help Merkin face everyday life, despite the many thousands of dollars she must have spent on therapy, hospitalization, medication, and leisure. Might life have been different for Merkin if it had demanded more regular work from her?
The book is also an inadvertent argument against the humanities in general. Merkin very obviously wants to be known as someone who is intimate with the "right" authors and artists. But her familiarity with literature doesn't help her. She comes across like a grad student who never moved beyond the fresh-faced academic's passion for great literature. I can't say exactly why this aspect of the book bothered me, but it really made me sad.
I picked up This Close to Happy to gain insight into depression, not to read a juicy, tell-all memoir. But it is much more the latter than the former. I can't relate to much of what it says about depression in general, and I'm uninterested in Merkin's inappropriately transparent autobiographical narrative. This book was a chore to finish, and not one I would recommend to anyone.
August 22, 2017
Merkin is an elegant writer. I could FEEL her sadness, her loneliness, her restless, self-destructive torment. But - like so many people who grew up neglected or abused - she can't find her way out of her own depressed mind. This book is a memoir of depression, so it naturally focusses on Merkin and her perspective... But it's clear that she's trapped in that perspective, her years of psychoanalysis notwithstanding.
Reading this memoir, I was at first impressed, then moved, then saddened, and finally frustrated by Merkin's miserable preoccupation with her own ruminations and moods. So much intelligence and eloquence; so little empathy for others or insight into herself.
Reading this memoir, I was at first impressed, then moved, then saddened, and finally frustrated by Merkin's miserable preoccupation with her own ruminations and moods. So much intelligence and eloquence; so little empathy for others or insight into herself.
May 15, 2019
Took me a long time to read this book. I finally finished the last two-thirds in one big spurt last night and this morning. I admire Daphne Merkin's ability to talk about her own depression in such a detailed way. It's tempting, often, to be vague and ashamed of what you're going through. However, she claims her depression as her own, and while it is the center of her life, she's done much else in her writing and publishing career, which is inspiring. The book inspires courage, in a "accept what you can and can't change" way.
December 27, 2022
Had to read this for school. As someone who also has suffered from depression, I was hoping to be able to relate to this book. It dragged on though and seemed repetitive. Also seemed more focused on her relationship with her mom, than depression.
August 19, 2017
Perhaps too raw.
Daphne Merkin's This Close to Happy is nominally a memoir of her depression, which seems to have set in during her adolescence and dogged her all her life, forcing her to institutionalization several times. The first chapter sets out the memoir's ambitions: to offer a female perspective on a disease which affects women more often--even as its mostly men who write about it, and in very masculine ways.
But the rest of the book doesn't really follow up on this promise. It dwells, instead, on her highly dysfunctional family, the poor coping mechanisms that she developed, and her belated, mostly unsuccessful attempts to find different ways of living. There are some glances at her depression, and she is fairly insistent that her particular depression was caused by what seems a loveless childhood. But the main focus of the book is her battle axe mother.
Merkin is defensive about her travails. She knows she grew up in great privilege and graduated into more: good entry-level jobs, developing an attractive body (that she didn't even realize was attractive), which allowed her to experiment sexually as she wanted. (One weirdness of the book: in a few cases she names her past lovers, who are semi-famous, but other times hides their identity. I wonder what prompted her to the different strategies.)
I don't really think that she needs to be as defensive as she is--this isn't the hardship olympics, after all, and living without love from one's parents is tragic, whatever the material circumstances. (I think of the old John Hiatt song: "You can learn to live with love or without it, but there ain't no cure.") Ultimately, I think her worry over whether she really deserves to be as miserable as she feels blunts the edge of the book.
Because most of the time her descriptions are fairly flat. She's a competent writer, but she's not sure what to say, which means the narrative comes out as one damned thing after another, all of it miserable, and almost none of it specific: her anecdotes lack the killer detail. The book gets boring, not because of her privilege, but because the story all seems the same, different ways of phrasing, "My mother didn't love me."
What it feels like is, not a book, but a letter you'd write to a friend, trusting that they know you enough, care enough about you, to be moved by these things that happened to a very specific you. The structure is odd, almost as if she is remembering things as she writes them and following them to the end, then suddenly jumping to another topic. But you don't want your friend to worry too much, and so there's an ending that feels inauthentic, a quick swerve to prove you're actually doing all right.
That's the rawness that doesn't quite work. It's not that the book is too emotionally raw--indeed, the emotion is blunted by the defensiveness, by the flatness of the narrative.
The book could have better conveyed what it was like to be Merkin, and certainly could have paid better attention to her depression itself, but I still feel for Merkin, I am sorry that she grew up under such terrible circumstances.
Daphne Merkin's This Close to Happy is nominally a memoir of her depression, which seems to have set in during her adolescence and dogged her all her life, forcing her to institutionalization several times. The first chapter sets out the memoir's ambitions: to offer a female perspective on a disease which affects women more often--even as its mostly men who write about it, and in very masculine ways.
But the rest of the book doesn't really follow up on this promise. It dwells, instead, on her highly dysfunctional family, the poor coping mechanisms that she developed, and her belated, mostly unsuccessful attempts to find different ways of living. There are some glances at her depression, and she is fairly insistent that her particular depression was caused by what seems a loveless childhood. But the main focus of the book is her battle axe mother.
Merkin is defensive about her travails. She knows she grew up in great privilege and graduated into more: good entry-level jobs, developing an attractive body (that she didn't even realize was attractive), which allowed her to experiment sexually as she wanted. (One weirdness of the book: in a few cases she names her past lovers, who are semi-famous, but other times hides their identity. I wonder what prompted her to the different strategies.)
I don't really think that she needs to be as defensive as she is--this isn't the hardship olympics, after all, and living without love from one's parents is tragic, whatever the material circumstances. (I think of the old John Hiatt song: "You can learn to live with love or without it, but there ain't no cure.") Ultimately, I think her worry over whether she really deserves to be as miserable as she feels blunts the edge of the book.
Because most of the time her descriptions are fairly flat. She's a competent writer, but she's not sure what to say, which means the narrative comes out as one damned thing after another, all of it miserable, and almost none of it specific: her anecdotes lack the killer detail. The book gets boring, not because of her privilege, but because the story all seems the same, different ways of phrasing, "My mother didn't love me."
What it feels like is, not a book, but a letter you'd write to a friend, trusting that they know you enough, care enough about you, to be moved by these things that happened to a very specific you. The structure is odd, almost as if she is remembering things as she writes them and following them to the end, then suddenly jumping to another topic. But you don't want your friend to worry too much, and so there's an ending that feels inauthentic, a quick swerve to prove you're actually doing all right.
That's the rawness that doesn't quite work. It's not that the book is too emotionally raw--indeed, the emotion is blunted by the defensiveness, by the flatness of the narrative.
The book could have better conveyed what it was like to be Merkin, and certainly could have paid better attention to her depression itself, but I still feel for Merkin, I am sorry that she grew up under such terrible circumstances.
March 12, 2017
Less about depression and more about her childhood. Not even a memoir, though - too nonlinear.
April 19, 2017
Not what I was expecting. This book was too self indulgent 1 percenter, and not enough about what I thought the topic was about.
April 24, 2017
Bold, honest, brutal--everything I look for in a memoir, and more. Brava.
September 19, 2017
This is, objectively speaking, a fine memoir about the author’s lifelong struggle with major depressive disorder. A lot of memoirs about mental health are from people with bipolar disorder, or are written by men, so it was refreshing and interesting to read about a different kind of mental illness from a woman’s point of view.
Merkin does not delve into facts and figures, doesn’t bore with exposition -- she welcomes you into her personal life and her struggles. She is very frank and very open. She is raw and unflinching about her family life and her own upbringing. You may love this or hate it-- she comes from privilege but lived a life of emotional deprivation. You might say “poor little rich girl” but then I think you would be missing the point.
At times, she speaks so eloquently about the feelings and frustrations of depression, about the peaks and valleys of suicidal ideation, the hopes and failures of hospitalization and treatments-- it really spoke to me. At other times, she dwells so hard on her upbringing, on her childhood and complicated relationship with her mother; I felt ostracized. An outsider, looking in. I wanted to see more of myself in the book, forgetting sometimes that this was her story to tell.
Sometimes it felt like a 3 star book, but ultimately I gave it 4.
Merkin does not delve into facts and figures, doesn’t bore with exposition -- she welcomes you into her personal life and her struggles. She is very frank and very open. She is raw and unflinching about her family life and her own upbringing. You may love this or hate it-- she comes from privilege but lived a life of emotional deprivation. You might say “poor little rich girl” but then I think you would be missing the point.
At times, she speaks so eloquently about the feelings and frustrations of depression, about the peaks and valleys of suicidal ideation, the hopes and failures of hospitalization and treatments-- it really spoke to me. At other times, she dwells so hard on her upbringing, on her childhood and complicated relationship with her mother; I felt ostracized. An outsider, looking in. I wanted to see more of myself in the book, forgetting sometimes that this was her story to tell.
Sometimes it felt like a 3 star book, but ultimately I gave it 4.
April 17, 2017
As the subtitle says, this book is a reckoning with the author's almost life long depression and by that she means narrating and examining her life with depression as the central fact. Having lived so long with it, and as a writer by trade, Merkin is well aware of the cultural baggage that comes with depression, including as a sometimes overly romanticised feature of the biographies of famous writers and artists. She knows her life of relative privilege leaves her open to attack that surely it can.t be all that bad. But it is, and she nails it. Stares it down and tries to make sense of it, aided by decades of therapy and pharmaceuticals that she knows have saved her life without resolving the nature vs. nurture conundrum. In any case, her childhood of emotional deprivation, finely wrought in agonising detail, clearly has a lot to answer for. I am not sure what drew me to this memoir, the glowing reviews perhaps or an intermittent interest in the genre, but I am glad I read it and that Merkin wrote it.
November 29, 2017
While I find the author completely unlike-able as a person I can appreciate her “excessive candor”. I can also appreciate that it doesn’t seem particularly important for her to be liked.
As someone who’s most consistent thoughts in life, since about the age of 9, are suicidal I find many of Merkin’s descriptions very relatable. It’s nice to read something about chronic rather than acute depression.
As someone who’s most consistent thoughts in life, since about the age of 9, are suicidal I find many of Merkin’s descriptions very relatable. It’s nice to read something about chronic rather than acute depression.
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