"During my years as a patient, I felt a guilty and unshakeable conviction that I was completely sane. Of course, my notion that patients were expected to be crazy was a naive one, but I had swallowed whole the ideology that connects madness to beauty of spirit. In fact, I wasn't interested in being happier, but in growing more poignantly, becomingly, meaningfully unhappy."Here, in her own words, is Emily Fox Gordon, therapy veteran, sometime mental patient, and a prize-winning essayist whose writing Rosellen Brown has praised as "acute and engaging... a combination of wit, rigor and deep feeling." In this astounding memoir, she tells the story of her "therapeutic education," marked by no fewer than five therapists before she turned seventeen. At eighteen, after a half-hearted suicide attempt, Gordon, mired in adolescent angst, began a three-year sojourn at the prestigious Austen Riggs sanitarium. It was at Riggs that Gordon was "rescued" by the maverick psychoanalyst Leslie Farber. Beautifully crafted, and startling in its observations of the therapeutic enterprise, Mockingbird Years is an auspicious debut by a major new talent. '[Gordon is] a stunning writer whose perceptions are casually penetrating. Her guilelessly understated memoir is as good an argument for the examined life…as it is a dissection of the many ways in which therapy can go wrong.'
Daphne Merkin
New York Times Book Review 'Good writing is itself a moral virtue. Wit, complexity, and detail are its outward signs, and Mockingbird Years shines with them.'
The New Yorker ' [A] beautifully written book, at times both provocative and rewarding.'
Philadelphia Weekly '[An] eloquent book…A work of art by an author with a unique voice and a gift for living, examining and writing about 'the conscious life.' '
Women's Review of Books In the spirit of Girl, Interrupted and An Unquiet Mind, an award-winning writer's powerful and intimate chronicle of her long journey through psychotherapy and her eventual escape from it. 'During my years as a patient, I felt a guilty and unshakeable conviction that I was completely sane. Of course, my notion that patients were expected to be crazy was a naïve one, but I had swallowed whole the ideology that connects madness to beauty of spirit. In fact, I wasn't interested in being happier, but in growing more poignantly, becomingly, meaningfully unhappy.' Here, in her own words, is Emily Fox Gordon, therapy veteran, sometime mental patient, and a prize-winning essayist whose writing Rosellen Brown has praised as 'acute and engaging… a combination of wit, rigor and deep feeling.' |
