This Close to Happy Read online

  It’s one thing, that is, if you’re a suitably heroic or accomplished figure: Winston Churchill, valiantly waging war against Hitler while fending off bouts of melancholy by way of painting and bricklaying (although it seems to have been his wife, Clementine, who suffered more deeply from depression, eventually seeking out ECT—electroconvulsive therapy, or as it has come to be known, shock therapy—in her latter years); or Abraham Lincoln, wrestling with self-doubt and despair while pursuing his vision of a republic free of slavery. It’s another thing entirely if you’re one of millions of anonymous sufferers who are living as best they can while they fend off similar demons. Like the painter from Chapel Hill who’s read my articles about depression that have appeared over the years in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, and once wrote me: “The black dog has followed me since my late teens and sleeps beside my bed. He put my father in the hospital.”

  I have received letters, some of them eloquent and some nearly inarticulate, from a thirty-five-year-old inmate in Sing Sing; an ancient golfing buddy of John Updike’s; and a “melancholic old English professor” whose daughter died at the age of twenty-nine, after being in and out of locked wards. Then there was the pseudonymous “Lisa,” whose communication arrived in an assertive priority mail package and consisted of several pages torn from a yellow legal pad across which she had scrawled in a childlike print a list of “Hints from Heloise”–type suggestions for staving off depression, some of them commonsensical and some mystifying (“avoid every bit of grapefruit” and “avoid all songs with words”). Although the rush of recognition from others who have suffered doesn’t do much to relieve the immediate anguish, coming as it does from someone who has survived on his or her own highly particular terms, there is solace in the knowledge that company can be found, even in the dark.

  For years now, I have been on the lookout for a report from the battlefield that matched my own experience of depression and have failed to discover one. I am writing this book in part to fill that void, to describe what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression from the inside, in a way that I hope will speak to both the sufferers and the onlookers to that suffering, whether friends or family. Although the past two decades have seen a significant number of books that have taken up the issues of depression, both unipolar and bipolar, including Styron’s Darkness Visible, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, it seems to me that these characterizations tend to bracket the episodes of breakdown or incapacitating depression within unimpeachable demonstrations of the writer’s otherwise hyperfunctioning existence. (It is worth noting in this regard that Darkness Visible begins when Styron is on his way to Paris to receive a prestigious award, and that the book’s subtitle is “a memoir of madness.”)

  This characterization allows the reader to see depression as fascinatingly rare and abnormal, rather than as the all-too-common, unexotically normal psychological albatross it often is, against which one tries to construct a flourishing self. Whether this is done out of a self-protective impulse or out of a wish to protect the reader is hard to say, and I’m not sure even the writer would know.

  What I do know is that, as I experience it, the stigma surrounding depression remains very real. There is something about the state that is both shameful and self-implicating in a way that other illnesses aren’t. It does not, for example, fit neatly in with the literature of addiction and recovery, and it offers the reader no vicarious thrills, mostly because its symptoms are rarely florid enough to alienate or even titillate people. If there is something intangible about mental illness generally, depression is all the harder to define because it tends to creep in rather than announce itself, manifesting itself as an absence—of appetite, energy, sociability—rather than as a presence. There is little you can point to: no obscene rantings, no sudden flips into unrecognizable, hyper-energized behavior, no magical belief systems involving lottery numbers or fortune cookies. It seems to me that we are suspicious of depression’s claim to legitimacy in part because it doesn’t look crazy.

  Then, too, the very murkiness surrounding depression—involving as it does both a biological and psychological component—has made it the phenomenological whipping boy of the ongoing heated nature/nurture debate about the evolution and content of our respective characters. It has become a magnet for the worst projections of both our Puritan heritage and our pill-happy contemporary moment, with the unfortunate result being that it is both underdiagnosed and overmedicalized. We veer, on the one hand, between shooing depression away as a phantom illness amenable to exertions of willpower (put one foot ahead of the other), and, on the other, treating it as an issue for the ministrations of the general practitioner, who is deemed as capable of dispensing antidepressants as he is of giving flu shots.

  I first agreed to write this book fifteen years ago, in the wake of publishing a piece in The New Yorker about being hospitalized for depression. I believe it has taken me this long to actually get it done because in writing about depression I am doing battle with both my ongoing fear of depression’s return and my actual recurring bouts of it. But I am also doing battle with childhood ghosts, with the inhibitions I carry about the value of my story and whether I’m allowed to tell it. The slaying of ghosts is never easy, and my ghosts are particularly authoritative, exhorting me to keep my head down and my saga to myself. Finally, though, I am writing this book in an effort to exert some mastery over my own experience by closely observing it. My hope is that I will improve my chances of survival if I am clear about what is at stake: my life as I have slowly begun to make it, not as it has been made by others. In the process, I am trying not only to shatter the sinister enchantment of my childhood but also to wrest my story away from my own earlier telling of it—a narrative that once may have felt necessary and true, but that has by now become its own sort of prison.

  I try to think of my experience of depression as “the dark season,” in part as a gesture of hope that it will depart just as it has arrived and in part as an effort at prettifying a condition that is wholly unaesthetic. When it comes, it doesn’t help to remind myself that I’ve been here before, that the place isn’t entirely new, that it’s got a familiar stale smell, a familiar lack of light and excess of enclosure. It doesn’t help to think of the poor or lost or blighted, of people being tortured in Syria, starved in the Sudan, or beaten in Baltimore. What I want to know is how I will ever get out from under, and whether there is really any other kind of season. You see, down here, where life hangs heavy like a suffocating cloak, I can’t remember that I’ve ever felt any other way. I need to be reminded that there are reasons in the world to hold on, even if I have forgotten them; I tell myself if I can just hold on I will remember them, these reasons, they will come back to me.

  2

  Sometimes I feel doomed to tell the story of my family over and over again, like the injunction at the annual Passover seder to narrate the story of the Jews’ liberation from Pharaoh’s cruel dominion and their subsequent departure from Egypt. In the Hebrew text this retelling is described explicitly as a “mitzvah,” a good deed. We are called upon to impart the tale once more by reading the Haggadah aloud, for ourselves and for our guests, so we will not forget the fraught historical circumstances that brought us from there to here, from slavery to emancipation. I think of my childhood as a kind of slavery—certainly an imprisonment of sorts—but am not sure, even all these decades later, that I have ever escaped, ever reached anything but the most transitory sort of freedom.

  This story, like all stories, goes forward and backward in time. Unlike most stories, the past never stays safely in its recessed place. Instead, it haunts the present to such an extent that it threatens to overwhelm it, to render it inoperative. For instance: it is late at night—early in the morning, actually—sometime in the present, and I am on the phone, talking with one of my sisters about the Tragedy of Our Family. We have circled this bleak subject many, many times before, detailing the i
nexplicable and unbearable reality of growing up in our house. My sister uses words like “carnage” and “damage”; I murmur assent. No one else who grew up in our house is as interested in having this conversation, not any of our four siblings—or, for that matter, our assorted children—but the two of us are enraptured by this tale, hooked on its horror, although we know all of its twists and turns and, by now, have a pretty good sense of the outcome. All the same, it seems we will never have enough of evoking the look and feel of the barbed-wire infrastructure of our early life, gilded over by its Park Avenue façade.

  How, we wonder once again, to explain our mother’s insidious cruelty—her wish to “eat her own,” as one sibling’s psychiatrist once dramatically put it, a kind of pathology undetectable by others because she seemed to be so different on the surface. Although I can’t say that my mother would have struck anyone who met her as sweet, exactly, she passed muster as a certain type of mother, cold and a bit detached, but not as an outright anomaly—a monster-in-hiding. No matter that she didn’t have any of the identifying characteristics of a normal mother, one who looked out for her young and wished them a life as good as or better than hers. In truth, it might have been difficult to discern her essential warpedness any which way, because the concept of “mothers” comes at us with inherently positive signifiers. Mothers, that is, aren’t expected to lunge at their offspring with jaws snapping.

  “Your tears don’t move me,” she would tell me repeatedly when I cried as a little girl. And she’d warn, “You’ll feel my five fingers in your face,” right before slapping me. She would also tell me in one and the same breath that I was potentially pretty but that I looked hideous—she pressed hard on the word, emphasizing the first syllable and rushing along the second, as in hi-dyus—if I wasn’t in a cheerful mood. “I can’t explain it,” she’d say, as if analyzing a chemical reaction. “Something happens to your face when you’re moody.” (Moody was another favorite of hers.) “You just look hi-dyus.” I walked around with great self-consciousness, trying to keep my features genial and harmonious, fearful that they’d collapse into a repellent image if I weren’t careful.

  Don’t get me wrong: my mother wasn’t overtly negligent or crazy. She could go through the motions well enough, albeit all at a remove: oversee a birthday party with a chocolate-frosted cake made by Iva the cook, consult with the pediatrician over the phone, arrange for someone to take us to the dentist. But the underlying message she conveyed was poisoned with envy and disparagement. “I think he might be gay,” she once remarked cheerily out of the blue about my older brother, who exhibited no signs of homosexuality that I could detect but who for a brief period in his teens wore his sideburns long, in a style my mother deemed feminine. Or, when I rushed home to impart the news that a piece of fiction I had written had been accepted by The New Yorker, “Your nose looks big when you smile.” I worried about my nose anyway—it was a classically ethnic nose with a slight, aristocratic bump and a downward tilt rather than the cute, upturned model—but it was this remark that convinced me to get it bobbed.

  Most of all, she didn’t want any of us to think we were important—certainly not as worthy of taking up space as she was. Stop talking about yourself, she’d regularly tell me throughout my childhood as I walked along with her, regaling her about some small grievance or triumph. And although she filled us with stories of her own limitless promise, if only her education hadn’t been truncated by the Nazis, she liked to cut our fledgling aspirations down. When I used to wonder aloud to her, like the girl in the song “Que Sera, Sera,” what I would become as a grown-up—for a while I saw myself being an actress—she’d dash my visions of my future by assuring me that I could always work at Woolworth’s, the five-and-ten store on Lexington Avenue. I took her seriously, imagined myself doomed to a lifetime of drably ringing up purchases of buttons and cleaning products, wearing a 1950s-style waisted dress and practical flats. Later in life she observed, with great glee, as though her deepest dream for us had been one of downward mobility: “All my children married poor as church-mice.”

  Now, more than forty years later, comes this compensatory barrage of words, this microscopic parsing of our injured selves. I lie on my bed, propped up against pillows, as my sister and I talk and talk, past 3:00 a.m., vigilantly awake in our apartments across the park from each other. The city that never sleeps has gone mostly quiet, with just an occasional sound of traffic or sudden cry from a passerby. My sister and I share a moment of silence as we assess the cost to our lives of all that has gone wrong and the havoc it has left in its wake, making it all but impossible to thrive as an adult.

  Although none of us has emerged unscathed, there is always the factor of individual resilience, more or less of it, helping to shape one’s destiny. The “boys” (that is how I still think of my brothers, although they are in their fifties and sixties), for all their faltering and misdemeanors, seem to have done better than the “girls” (as I still think of my sisters and myself); they have put the past further behind them. As for me, I take large doses of medication just to get through the day, gulping down twenty milligrams of this and seventy milligrams of that, dopamine enhancers, mood stabilizers, and uppers, a handful of pills in various colors, shapes, and sizes that alter the chemistry in my brain in ways nobody quite understands, which all the same should help explain how I am still here to tell the full, blasted tale.

  If we could figure it out—what made my parents behave the way they did and why we responded the way we did, some of us more scarred than others, but all of us affected—would that help anything now? Then, too, I wonder: If we could unmake ourselves as we are, do away with all the misery, would we leap at the chance? Isn’t it the essence of trauma to repeat itself, just as it is the essence of neurosis to resist change, to fear the step away from the familiar shadows and into the light? How would I have turned out if I hadn’t turned out as I am? With all that bothers me about myself, it is too large a stretch to imagine myself as someone else, sent into the world on a current of love.

  * * *

  The thing about remembering is this: I am never sure how much credence to give my own memories, what is accurately recalled and what is a reconstruction after the fact. One of my brothers insists that he remembers the day he was born, but he is known within the family for being inventive with the truth, so I take this assertion with a grain of salt. Then there is the writer William Maxwell, who, in So Long, See You Tomorrow, a novel that shifts in and out of memoir mode, notes that “in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”

  The reality is that some of us have longer—and more exacting—memories than others. (I am speaking here of affective as well as factual memory, the former involving emotional and visual recall rather than dredging up facts or other concrete bits of information.) It’s a means of adaptation, really; some people survive by repressing or denying their own experiences while others try to master the indignities and humiliations of the past by storing them up in their minds, the better to revisit and replay them. I would place myself in this latter category; although there is much I don’t remember, whole swaths of time that are lost to me, I believe it would be beneficial to forget even more—to let grievances and sorrows slip through my fingers rather than straining to hold on to them.

  So here I am, just past a year old, in an ancient black-and-white snapshot, holding on to the side of the playpen I have been plunked in one afternoon in the garden behind our first summer house in Long Beach, an hour’s drive from the city. Of course, someone must have taken the picture, but what it conveys to me is a sense of utter aloneness. The house is made of red brick with white trim, and stands imposingly on the corner of West Beach Street on a June or July day in the mid-1950s, under a white-hot sky. Playpens aren’t much in vogue anymore—I don’t think I put my own daughter in one more than a few times, despite my mother urging it upon me as something of a minor miracle of child care—and I can see why: they’re little prisons, really, meant for
the convenience of the caretaker and the displeased confinement of the child.

  I am wearing cloth diapers fastened with safety pins over which my belly pouts, and nothing else. My legs are slightly knock-kneed. My hair is still baby-fine and cut short, with the kind of mid-century, butchered-looking, mid-forehead bangs you don’t see on children these days. I am reasonably cute-looking, with big brown eyes—the only inheritor among the six of us of my father’s dark eyes instead of my mother’s light ones, a detail that will make me feel unfairly singled out in the years to come.

  It must have taken some effort to get myself into a standing position—I would have had to do it in carefully coordinated stages, pulling myself along with great concentration—and it would have been nice to be recognized for this feat but there are too many other children around to watch over and my mother is not the type to keep track of my progress, in any case. My mother, if she is around at all, sits far off in the garden, reading a novel in a lounge chair, or talking to one of the profusion of Israeli relatives who visit at my father’s expense, eager to see how she has fared with a rich husband in Christian America. To the precise degree that she is unavailable, I crave my mother, wish she would come and pick me up, hold her face against mine. She does this very little. Instead I am handed over first to a baby nurse whose name I can’t remember and who is a German immigrant, like my parents—efficient, undoubtedly, but not given to displays of affection—and then to Jane, the Dutch-born cleaning woman my mother had blithely hired to look after the six of us shortly before I was born, the scourge of my childhood.

  I imagine I must have felt stranded in the playpen, stuck with myself. I’m sure there were familiar summery sounds in the background—lawn mowers humming, mosquitoes buzzing, and the occasional chirping of birds—but inside my head I might as well have disappeared. How young do the stirrings of anxiety begin, the feeling of being nowhere and belonging to no one? I assume it started somewhere around then, that default position of something akin to vertigo, manifesting itself in an acute sense of placelessness.