Hurry Down Sunshine - Softcover

Greenberg, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006385265 ISBN 13: 9780006385264

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009

Synopsis

At the age of 15, during one long and difficult summer, Michael Greenberg’s daughter, Sally, was struck mad. Her visionary crack-up occurred on the streets of Greenwich Village and continued, among other places, in the lost-in-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during New York City’s most sweltering months.

 

Hurry Down Sunshine is Greenberg’s journey toward comprehending mental illness in his own family. With touching honesty and intimacy, he reveals the effect of Sally’s mania on those closest to her, including her easygoing brother, her stalwart grandmother, her new-age mother, her artistic, loving stepmother―and, finally, on himself.

 

Unsentimental, nuanced and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine is a transcendent memoir about mental illness and the restorative power of one father’s love for his daughter.

About this title

Review:

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

About the Author:

Michael Greenberg, a native New Yorker, is a columnist for the Times Literary Supplement (London), where his wide-ranging essays have been appearing since 2003. His fiction, criticism and travel pieces have been published widely. He lives in New York with his wife and nine-year-old son.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0006385265
• ISBN 13: 9780006385264
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240