Book Cellar
4736-38 N Lincoln Ave
773.293.2665
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Michael Greenberg, Hurry Down Sunshine
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Thursday Nov 6, 2008 (7pm)
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The best memoirs about mental illness — like William Styron's Darkness Visible or Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted — transcend the limitations of their form, although such pathography always beckons with voyeuristic glimpses of misery. Michael Greenberg's excellently written memoir, Hurry Down Sunshine, echoes the genre's most poignant predecessors. An unflinching chronicle of his teenage daughter's descent into "madness" (i.e. bipolar disorder), Greenberg's work details the uncertainties surrounding her initial psychotic breakdown, diagnosis, treatments, and rollercoaster recovery. There's no happy ending here, nor any sappy, Oprah-esque sentiments. But Greenberg's wry, lighting-bolt prose and unsentimental portrayal of his family's ordeal make for a brilliant, engrossing sketch of mental illness and its terrifying, destructive fallout.
