Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father's Story of Love and Madness (Vintage)
By:
Michael Greenberg
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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5
Description:
A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Hurry Down Sunshine is an extraordinary family story and a memoir of exceptional power. In it, Michael Greenberg recounts in vivid detail the remarkable summer when, at the age of fifteen, his daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally's sudden visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city's most sweltering months. It is a tale of a family broken open, then painstakingly, movingly stitched together again.
Among Greenberg's unforgettable cast of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary aspirations. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine is essential reading in the literature of affliction alongside classics such as Girl, Interrupted and An Unquiet Mind.
Description:
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: Michael Greenberg's spare, unflinching memoir begins with a bang: "On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad." Hurry Down Sunshine chronicles the summer when fifteen-year-old Sally experienced her first full-blown manic episode—an event that in a "single stroke" changed her identity and, by extension, that of her entire family. Simply told and beautifully written, Greenberg's memoir shines a stark light on mental illness, painting a vivid picture of a brain and body under siege—mania as a separate living thing squatting within the patient. As a writer who lives "so much in his head," Greenberg is particularly anguished by his daughter's fractured psyche, and his honesty about being both sickened and fascinated by his daughter's condition is breathtaking: "During the worst moments, I think of her as my disease—the disease I must bear...I am intoxicated with Sally's madness in both senses of the word: inebriated and poisoned." So desperate is he to understand her, that he relentlessly researches mental illness (the book is peppered with fascinating insights into drug therapy and anecdotes about writers who struggled with madness), and even goes so far as to sample a full dose of his daughter's medication. Startling, heart-wrenching, and yet unwaveringly unsentimental, Hurry Down Sunshine is an unforgettable story of a young girl's descent into madness, told through the eyes of a harried and helpless father trying desperately to bring her back. --Daphne Durham
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2009-09-08
Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Terrible Read! - This was one of the most boring and tiresome books I've read in a long while. Although a true story, it lacked continuity and the writing was horrendous.
Greenberg's attempt to tell the story of his 15-year-old daughter's mental breakdown came up short with too many underdeveloped characters and others who weren't necessary to tell the story. The clarity of the book was muddied by the incessant chatter of issues not required nor belonged in the memoir.
A truly disappointing read!
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
An uneasy truce - Rossa Forbes is a contributor to Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change
This is a beautifully written book about the sudden onset of bi-polar disorder in the author's 15 year old daughter. The father unsparingly chronicles the changes that took place in his daughter and the havoc that was created in their small household. With a writer's eye and sensitivity, he struggles to understand the condition in the literary sense (relating James Joyce's struggle to understand his schizophrenic daughter Lucia). He sees his daughter as highly gifted and caring, marvels at her creative energy, and wonders, like I do about my own child, if this is not just a struggle to grow as a human being. We, of course, feel that professional help is needed, but we are also not convinced by the current drug treatment approach.
I am disappointed that the author does not make a clearer case for why he is disillusioned with the medication. He is troubled by it, yet somehow has struck an uneasy, but unexplained truce.
Michael Greenberg's daughter was acutely ill for a very short time (seven weeks) and that is the time period that the book covers. Had she been ill longer he might have had to look beyond the medication and limited psychotherapy for help. On the other hand, he is a father, not a mother and as a father he can detach himself in ways that the mother often cannot. There are of course, deep father/child bonds, but the mother/child affinity is unique.
This book was written ten years after his daughter's first episode. She has continued to struggle intermittently with bi-polar while on various medications, medications he has grown to hate. In my son's case, because his illness continued much longer than seven weeks, and because he was not getting better on the medications, I had to do something for him myself. I feel that this extra time allowed me to find the cause or causes of his symptoms. I was able to spend more time with psychiatrists and institutional psychiatric care, seeing what the drugs and the attitudes really did to my son (and to me!). I had to finally part ways with the institutional psychiatrists because they were not helping my son to get better. There is so much creativity and a poetry to the condition that I sometimes wonder if the reason for these conditions is to bring out creativity in others, or at the very least to allow us to pause and contemplate life's purpose.
Customer Review: 3 out of 5
A Poignant Memoir - Hurry Down Sunshine is Michael Greenberg's painful memoir of the summer his fifteen year old daughter was diagnosed as bipolar. Bright, outgoing and verbal, he and his wife didn't notice that Sally was edging closer and closer to the edge. She was staying up all night, writing frantically in her journals and walking for hours in New York. But it was summer with summer's relaxed structure and they thought it was the typical teenage behavior of finding one's self and one's voice.
Then came the day when it became apparent that this was more than normal teenage angst. Sally became very agitated, unable to stop talking and babbling, eager to share her revelations. The family took her to the hospital, and then were appalled to find that she needed to be admitted to the psychological ward.
The book details family reactions. There was guilt, disbelief, and incredible amounts of worry about what would happen to Sally in the future. Compounding the issue, the author had a brother that had always struggled with mental illness. Seeing his maladjusted life, the pain of realising that his daughter might be headed down the same road was almost unbearable.
Yet the book is inspring also. The reader walks with the family through recovery as different drugs are administered, each with it's own set of side effects. Sally was able to come home as the summer progressed, and by the time the summer was over, was able to go back to her high school. The book details how her struggle changed the family and its dynamics forever, as they learned to live with this lifetime affliction.
This book is recommended for those struggling with the diagnosis of mental illness or for parents facing any type of life-altering issue in their child's life. It is also recommended for those who have been diagnosed, giving hope for how to live with the new reality.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Excellent memoir - Excellent memoir of a father's description of his teen daughter's descent into madness. I couldn't put the book down; I had to find out what happened to Sally. I have a daughter with OCD so I could understand his helplessness and feelings of futility. Recommended for anyone who has ever had a child with a mental illness.
Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Doesn't reach it's full potential - Spoiled by the haunting story-weaving of Lamb and by the raw lyricism of Sheff, I eagerly paid full price (in tough times my book budget is quite slim). By the end of the first half hour in I was looking at the back cover again to remind myself of the genre... Yup, it's a memoir, daughter crack-up? Check ...
The premise-and promise- of a contemporary glimpse into how one 'cracks up' in the City in the summer was tantalizing ..but while pieces of the story engaged and even enraptured me (tell me more along the lines of how you, having popped your daughter's antipsychotics ,convinced a screenwriter that you're aloof and trendy enough to land a writing gig to die for!), I was left feeling as though I bought real estate in an ocean and was only permitted to wade up to my kneecaps..
I want to know more about Pat- about the contrasts in your relationships with these two women, how your mother influenced your choice in women and even in how you chose to parent Sally.. How did you weave the tapestry of your life around such circumstances without a hint of excess, save for the violent moment in the bathroom ? I think you held back so much, and your story is only partly told...
Clearly a talented writer; but the story feels too antiseptic and at times, oddly removed from the writer himself.
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