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Dec
07
Book Review: Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg
2008 at 2pm Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Recently published September 2008.
On July 5, 1996, Michael Greenberg’s 15-year-old daughter Sally had what he calls her first “crack-up,” an acute manic episode that seemed to come out of nowhere, during which she believed that she alone understood the genius within each of us and had been chosen to bring her message to the world. Hurry Down Sunshine is Greenberg’s memoir of that summer, in which it became clear that nothing was as it seemed, and everything was changing.
Always a girl of “bewilderingly sharp intelligence,” Sally became almost obsessively interested in poetry and music during her 15th summer. Greenberg and his wife Pat, Sally’s stepmother, were used to her “terrifying precociousness” and assumed her passion was par for the course for a fifteen-year-old girl. When they come home one afternoon to find her rambling incoherently about the genius in the world and the message she’s been chosen to bring, their first thought is that she must be high on something. Sally’s friend Cass, who is at home with Sally when the “crack-up” begins, swears up and down that they’re not high, and Greenberg struggles to accept that something else could be going on.
The longer she speaks, the more incoherent she becomes, and the more incoherent she becomes, the more urgent is her need to make us understand her! I feel hopeless watching her.
After several hours of watching Sally’s behavior become increasingly erratic, violent, and disturbing, Greenberg and his wife take her to the emergency room, where a physician quickly concludes that she is suffering from “acute psychosis.” They knew that is what it was going to be, but hearing the words spoken aloud makes a profound impact on Greenberg.
Acute psychosis. The phrase shocks me. By comparison, “mental illness” sounds benign.
Sally is admitted to an in-patient program where she joins the ranks of the institutionalized, receiving regimented medication and therapy, and Greenberg begins to grasp on a deeper level exactly how this turn has changed their family.
In a single stroke her identity was changed; and by extensiou, ours, as a family, has changed too.
He remembers the daughter with whom he shared so much and fears that they will never be able to recover their relationship.
Suddenly every point of connection between us had vanished. It didn’t seem possible. She had learned to speak from me; she had heard her first stories from me. Indelible experiences, I thought. And yet from one day to the next we had become strangers.
And later:
In the most profound sense Sally and I are strangers: we have no common language.
When Sally is released from in-patient treatment and moves back home with Greenberg and Pat, their household must be organized around Sally’s routine, her therapy, and monitoring her behavior. Greenberg watches as she sits, dazed, under the fog of medication, and one day, he takes a full dose of her drugs so he can know what she experiences. He finds that they induce indifference and apathy, that they “release her not from her cares, but from caring itself.” He wonders if she will ever return to a normal life and worries about how she will be received and perceived by others.
One of the most profound features of this book is Greenberg’s assessment and understanding of mental illness and what it can do to one’s identity and one’s family. He ruminates on whether Sally will ever be able to separate her identity from her illness, and he demonstrates impressive clarity in describing the experience of the mentally ill to those of us who have never known it.
We all fear at some point that “our” world and “the” world are hopelessly estranged. Psychosis is the fulfillment of that fear.
This is the book all those other “I-or-someone-in-my-family-went-crazy” memoirs wish they could be. Greenberg handles the subject matter with sensitivity and insight, weaving in pieces of research and information without becoming pedantic, and he describes Sally’s “crack-up” in all of its absurdity and confusion without belittling or demeaning her or people with mental illness as a group. He is not out to entertain or to shock or to garner pity, and the matter-of-factness with which he tells Sally’s story makes it that much more powerful. His tone is neither too detached nor too emotional, and this makes his voice and his story incredibly accessible.
Greenberg’s writing is straightforward and honest. He describes his struggle to accept and understand Sally’s illness, his frustration with its essential unexplainability, and the temptation to find someone (even himself) to blame for it. He addresses the ways in which Sally’s illness (eventually diagnosed as bipolar disorder) changed him and his family, and he does it all with grace and kindness, resisting the urge to blame Sally for something she clearly did not cause and cannot control.
It’s difficult to say you loved a book like this, with such difficult and occasionally upsetting content, but I loved Hurry Down Sunshine and am surprised we haven’t been hearing more about it. I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in mental illness and psychology, and I think the families of individiuals with bipolar disorder will find their stories told within its pages. 4.5 out of 5.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Rebecca Schinsky
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Wow! This sounds amazing, thanks for the wonderful review.
I was diagnosed as bi-polar at 12 (although on a much less serious level than this girl appears) It was especially intriguing when you mentioned the father took his daughters meds to see how they made her feel. I wish someone had done that for me, when I was going thorough months of finding the right drug to offer balance rather than oblivion.
Rebecca, I loved this book when I read/reviewed it (here).
It is, as you say, honest and raw. I appreciate that Greenberg doesn’t try to interpret what Sally is feeling, but sticks to his viewpoint as a father.
*Beautiful Boy* is another good one I thought, have you read it?