MEMOIR: Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father's Memoir of Love and MadnessBy Michael Greenberg Bloomsbury, 233pp. £12.99
‘IT FEELS as if we have been living all summer inside a fable.”
It is the summer of 1996, New York City is sweltering, and Michael Greenberg’s 15-year-old daughter is hurtling towards “dystopic mania”.
Initially, Greenberg takes Sally’s intensity – up all night with Bach, Shakespeare’s sonnets, her own feverishly composed verse – as an intellectual flowering. (Sally had overcome some early learning difficulties.) But one night, having run out into traffic thinking she could stop cars, Sally is brought home by the police.
The following day, she tells Greenberg and his wife, Pat, that she has had a vision. While watching two girls at the playground, she saw their “limitless native little-girl genius” and realized that we are all geniuses. This, she explained, is the unspoken secret we are afraid to acknowledge. The good news is that she, Sally, has been chosen to cure us of the suffering all this repressed genius is inflicting.
Greenberg – a writer, a loving parent, a man who balks at the reductive biomedical model of insanity – initially tries to decipher the symbology of Sally’s delusion.
Perhaps it points to a yearning to recapture her own “idealized instant of experience”? Before diagnostic tests and “special needs”, before divorce and betrayal. But it is soon clear that Sally is acutely psychotic. He and Pat sign her into a psychiatric ward, where she takes 30 hours and a lot of haloperidol to come down. When next they see her, she is again transformed: walking the ward with a Parkinsonian shuffle, yet still with that “hectic glitter” in her eye. “She climbs stiffly into bed, her mania wriggling under the surface like a cat in a zippered bag”.
Hurry Down Sunshineis the first book by Michael Greenberg, a fiction writer and essayist, and a columnist for the TLS. He eschews in his memoir long digressions into the history or the literature of mania, focusing almost exclusively on events of that summer. Much of the "action" takes place within the confines of the psychiatric ward as Sally's family waits for her "monstrous ebullience" to pass. Characters enter and exit, as if the ward were a stage – Sally's parents and step-parents, her grandmother and brother. Various interpersonal dramas unfold.
Patients and their visitors have bit parts to play. Of particular fascination to Greenberg, himself “a lapsed Jew”, is a 19-year-old Hasidic patient, who his family believes has achieved devaykah, a state of constant communion with God. “His family surrounds him like a protecting herd: the curse of madness collectively borne by the tribe. Or so I imagine. I feel a surge of admiration and envy . . .”
Just off stage is Greenberg’s brother Steve – “schizoid” in the 1960s, “borderline” in the 1980s, now “chronically maladjusted” – who is in the midst of his own breakdown. Steve has been on anti-psychotics for 30 years and describes himself as a “living side effect”.
“That Steve’s precipitous downward slide has come at the same time as Sally’s crack-up seems absurdly operatic,” Greenberg writes. It also reinforces Greenberg’s fear that in Steve he is glimpsing Sally’s future.
Having spent the better part of July in the hospital, Sally is released with a “Wellness Contract” (a 12-step style set of guidelines) and prescriptions for an anti-psychotic, sleeping pills, an anti-convulsant, an anti-anxiety agent and a muscle relaxant. She is assigned a psychiatrist at an Outpatient Behavioral Clinic. And, she is given a diagnosis: Bipolar 1.
Back home with her father and Pat, she continues, for a time, to dip in and out of psychosis, with no seeming middle ground between her “explosions” and a “chemically imposed carelessness”. Though Greenberg doesn’t engage in much explicit theorising about what happens to the boundaries between parent and child in such a situation, he is clearly aware of a blurring. He is fascinated by the relationship between James Joyce and his mentally ill daughter Lucia. (“Jung compared father and daughter to two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling, the other diving”.) He himself feels in the grip of an “unshakeable sobriety, compensation perhaps for the psychic drunkenness of Sally. It is as if . . . I am holding on to her sober self, her other self, which she has temporarily misplaced . . .”.
In an effort, finally, to see the world as his daughter does, he takes a full dose of her medication. Gripped by a paradoxical “panic of indifference”, he passes several zombie-like hours, after which he concludes that the drugs release Sally not from her cares, but from caring itself.
“It’s something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that on one level it is,” Greenberg writes. “But there were moments with my daughter when I had the distressed sense of being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too.”
Much of what makes this book wonderful is encapsulated in the above. Greenberg approaches his daughter’s psychosis with a somewhat unfashionable awe. Though his astonished curiosity is infused, at every step, with the pain of witnessing her unravelling, his efforts to understand – on her terms – what is happening bespeak a deep compassion.
His prose is free of both cloying sentiment and any posturing matter-of-factness. There is instead an unusual naturalness with which he tells the story of several people muddling through a crisis to emerge into a more precarious but deeper sense of themselves. His own awe survives, now accompanied by an awareness of Sally’s new fragility.
“She seems immensely matured. I realize that she has acquired another dimension. Her range of experience seems enormous. I have to remind myself of how little she has lived, that she is still a girl”.
In 2006, CNN reported that prescriptions of anti-psychotic drugs to American children had increased five-fold between 1995 and 2002. More recently, in a report in the New York Review of Bookson the financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatric profession, Marcia Angell wrote: "We are now in the midst of an apparent epidemic of bipolar disease in children . . . with a forty-fold increase in the diagnosis between 1994 and 2003". Children as young as two are being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with powerful drugs.
Greenberg has written an important book, not only because it elucidates, tenderly and intelligently, what happens within one family when a child falls apart, but because of its quiet insistence that we – and our agonies – are more than the biochemical processes that pharmaceutical companies might have us believe.
Molly McCloskey is the author of two collections of short stories and a novel. She is currently at work on a non-fiction narrative concerning schizophrenia and the family