Hurry Down Sunshine
By:
Michael Greenberg
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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5
Description:
HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE TELLS THE STORY OF THE extraordinary summer when, at the age of fifteen, Michael Greenberg’s daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally’s 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. “I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine. Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her–her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenberg’s unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.
“The psychotic break of his fifteen-year-old daughter is the grit around which Michael Greenberg forms the pearl that is Hurry Down Sunshine. It is a brilliant, taut, entirely original study of a suffering child and a family and marriage under siege. I know of no other book about madness whose claim to scientific knowledge is so modest and whose artistic achievement is so great.” – Janet Malcolm, author of The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes and The Journalist and the Murderer
“One of the most gripping and disturbingly honest books I have ever read. The courage Michael Greenberg shows in narrating the story of his adolescent daughter’s descent into psychosis is matched by his acute understanding of how alone each of us, sane or manic, is in our processing of reality and our attempts to get others to appreciate what seems important to us. This is a remarkable memoir.” – Phillip Lopate, author of Two Marriages and Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan
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: Other Press
Release Date: 2008-09-09
Customer Review: 2 out of 5
How to get over - Interesting book not for the story but for the sub-text - how a self-indulgent, trust-fund brat who likes the idea of being an artist but lacks the actual talent, finally figures out, at long, long, last, how to get over as a bona fide writer and validate a feckless life of unremitting b.s. - exploit his child's illness. Not quite as degraded as Larry Rivers, pop artiste, taking naked photos of his pubescent daughters, but not far removed. Considering the reviews, you think maybe it's time the art world worked out some new paradigms? Greenberg's writing is actually not so bad, it's just that he's a souless twinch.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Brilliant. - He leaves no detail un-written in this book following his daughter's first hit with madness. I'm about to re-read it right now. :)
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.
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