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At the age of 15, during one long and difficult summer, Michael Greenberg's
daughter, Sally, was struck mad. Her visionary crackup occurred on the streets
of Greenwich Village, and continued, among other places, in the lost-in-time
world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city's most sweltering months.
"I feel like I'm travelling and travelling with nowhere to go back to," Sally
says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling toward insanity.
Hurry Down Sunshine is Greenberg's journey to
comprehend mental illness and his own family, and to rescue his daughter from
her desperate downward spiral. With touching honesty and intimacy, he reveals
Sally's effect on those closest to her--her brother, her grandmother, her mother
and her stepmother--and, finally, on himself.
Greenberg's memorable gallery of characters includes a
surprisingly unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish mental patient and
a manic classic professor. 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.
On July 5th, 1996, my daughter was struck
mad....
My first impulse was to blame myself. Predictably, I tried to
tally up the mistakes I had made, what I had failed to provide her, but they
weren't enough to explain what had happened. Nothing was. Briefly, I placed my
hope in the doctors, then realized that, beyond the relatively narrow clinical
fact of her symptoms, they knew little more about her condition than I did. The
underlying mechanisms of psychosis, I would discover, are as shrouded in mystery
as they have ever been. And while this left little immediate hope for cure, it
pointed to broader secrets.
It's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity
as anything but the chemical brain disease that on one level it is. But there
were moments with my daughter when I had the distressed sense of being in the
presence of a rare force of nature, like a great blizzard or flood: destructive,
but in its way astounding too.
--From Hurry Down Sunshine
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