Hurry Down Sunshine
By:
Michael Greenberg
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List Price: $22.00
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: 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.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
in the same boat - I just finished Hurry Down Sunshine and found it to be very realistic in its portrayal of family reaction to an initial diagnosis of mental illness in the family. As a mother of a Bipolar son, it was spot on in telling about the feelings of parents and helplessness that come with a diagnosis of mental illness. I particularly identified with the difference in Sally as an infant with regard to being able to be soothed. This is identical to my son's behavior which we chalked up to his not wanting to be a baby. I can recall going through the same denial, trying to recall a specific incident that "triggered" the illness and how my poor parenting caused this to happen. I identified with the author's "wish" for is daughter to have a drug problem. That can be fixed. This is the most acurate account of the impact on the family as a unit. My only wish is that the long road to wellness and the one step forward, two steps back nature of the illness was expanded upon. Recommended for anyone who has a teen with mental illness.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
A Story Both Hopeful and Sad - "There is now a feeling that these traits have survived because they have some adaptive value. To be mildly manic depressive or mildly schizophrenic brings a flexibility of thought, an openness, and risk-taking behavior, which does have some adaptive value in creativity. The price paid for having those traits is that some will have mental illness." - so says Professor Gordon Claridge, emeritus professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford University. The strong correlation between creativity and mental illness is so well known as to be passe, but this book provides glimpses into that difficult realm that so many creative people walk between illness and enlightened.
I found the story both hopeful and sad. Hopeful in that it shows people with mental illness in their context, in their recovery, and in their uniqueness. Sally's own awareness of her mania, the way she grieves the loss of the feelings that go with it, her doubts about the insights she had while under "it's" spell, all highlight the wonder of the human mind, able to reflect on itself, on truth, and on what is valuable. The epilogue which reveals Sally's long term success reminded me that mental illness, for many of us, is a lifelong journey.
The book is painfully and believably honest, earnest, and well written.
Greenberg has a talent with understated concrete language which he combines with his own piercing personal reflections about people. It gives the book a trustworthy feel of authenticity. We see the supporting characters (family members mostly) in the story as completely human and driven by their needs and fears, but we also see them trying their best to be more than their fears, moving past their prejudgments about "crazy people" to real understanding. These are people to remember, the average ordinary people who fear the stigma of having a family member labeled this way, but who allow their love and attachment to overcome their prejudices. This aspect of the book makes it a heartening read.
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