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Hurry Down Sunshine tells the story of the extraordinary summer when, at the age of fifteen, Michael Greenberg's daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally's visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city's most sweltering months. "I feel like I'm traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to," Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine.
Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her — her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenberg's unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.
Review:
"Greenberg, a columnist for London's Times Literary Supplement, was living in Greenwich Village in 1996 when his 15-year-old daughter, Sally, suddenly became manic, importuning strangers and ranting in the streets about her newfound cosmic wisdom. She was a danger to herself and others, so her father and stepmother had her committed to a psychiatric facility. Greenberg was no stranger to mental illness; he'd been caring for his dysfunctional brother most of their adult lives. Still, Sally was so brilliant, so caring, he couldn't bear the thought of her ending up like his brother. During the 24 long days Sally spent in the hospital, Greenberg learned to cope. He watched a Hasidic family visiting with their mentally ill young man. He pondered his ex-wife going to cuddle with Sally, as if she were still a little girl. He listened to his mother explain her troubled marriage and the subsequent mental illness of his brother. He wondered at his present wife's resilience. After Sally's discharge, questions of how they would adjust to their new lives were complicated in very different ways. In this well-written and sincere memoir, Greenberg proves to be a caring man trying to find his way through the minefield of a loved one's madness. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
There is a moment in "Stalking Irish Madness" when the author, Patrick Tracey, looks at an old photo of two of his sisters, Chelle and Austine, and remarks, "There they are — a memory." Their schizophrenia is diagnosed later, at different times: Chelle catapults into a kind of psychotic exuberance — describing her breakup with Warren Beatty and her dates with Jesus — while Austine becomes nearly... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) catatonic, "pleading silently to some predatory personage for mercy." Both women are cruelly robbed of the people they once were, or once promised to be, in that photo. After watching a loved one's identity vanish, those left in the wake of severe mental illness must struggle with disturbing questions: Where has she gone? Why has she gone? Will she come back? "I can accept my mother's death," writes Tracey, "but the gone-and-not-dead are not so easily forgotten." This haunting notion inspires him to undertake investigations into both his family's long history of schizophrenia and the origins of the illness in Ireland. The first part of the book chronicles Tracey's lineage, and here the author offers astute descriptions of schizophrenia and the various ways it has taken hold of family members. But soon — sooner than the reader may like — he is journeying to Ireland to broaden his story, specifically to County Roscommon, where his ancestors are from and where, coincidentally, researchers discovered a gene linked to schizophrenia in 2002. But Tracey never pins down his ancestry or the answers he is seeking. Upon his return, he admits to being no closer to understanding the illness, but the journey has brought him closer to his sisters, both now spending their days at centers for the mentally ill. This anticlimax is the most moving testimony of the book: It makes painfully clear that both sorrow and surrender, crucially intertwined, attend efforts to bring meaning to the puzzle of mental illness. In his memoir, "Hurry Down Sunshine," Michael Greenberg also stands witness to family madness. He recalls, with extraordinary insight, the mania and later the depression that took hold of his 15-year-old daughter, Sally. Greenberg wonders how he will simultaneously grieve for — and learn to live with — his missing daughter. After being brought home by the police for "acting crazy" in the streets, she becomes suddenly violent, wrestling her father to the ground and scratching his face when he tries to keep her from leaving their New York City apartment. She is buzzing with a revelation she wants to share with the world: that we are all born geniuses but our intelligence is suppressed as we grow up. "In the most profound sense Sally and I are strangers: we have no common language," Greenberg writes. "She's gone away like the dead, leaving this false shell of herself to talk at me in an invented dialect only it can understand." A columnist for the Times Literary Supplement, Greenberg renders the details of his daughter's breakdown with lyrical precision. He ably describes the heightened sense of being that is often a component of madness — and the way it beckons to outsiders. "Sally's need to feel understood is like one's need for air," he confides and then adds: "Isn't this everyone's struggle? To recruit others to our version of reality? To persuade? To be seen for what we think we are?" Greenberg's writing is so effective that it somehow removes the sense of shock one might have about a father taking a dose of his daughter's mood stabilizers, as Greenberg does in an effort to get closer to what Sally is feeling. "I feel dizzy and far away," he writes of his reaction, "as if I am about to fall from a great height, but my feet are nailed to the edge of the precipice, so that the rush of the fall itself is indefinitely deferred." His intelligence and compassion help give a sense that his daughter is recovering even as he himself goes too far. And Sally does return. Without fanfare, she becomes herself again. "It's as if a miracle has occurred," Greenberg writes. "The miracle of normalcy, of ordinary existence." Alas, the miracle does not last, a difficult reminder, at the end of an otherwise triumphant story, of the enduring mystery of mental illness and the wretched way it can wind itself round a family. Reviewed by Nell Casey, editor of 'Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression' and 'An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Review:
"Greenberg...writes with unflinching honesty and heart....[A] startling piece of writing, by turns sobering and surreal." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review:
"[V]ivid yet surprisingly detached prose....Bears enlightening and articulate witness to the sheer force of an oft-misunderstood disease." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"[E]legiac, beautifully crafted....Sure to become a new classic in the literature of mental illness; highly recommended." Library Journal (Starred Review)
HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE TELLS THE STORY OF THE extraordinary summer when, at the age of fifteen, Michael Greenbergs daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sallys visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the citys most sweltering months. “I feel like Im traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine. Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her-her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenbergs unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.
“The psychotic break of his fifteen-year-old daughter is the grit around which Michael Greenberg forms the pearl that is Hurry Down Sunshine. It is a brilliant, taut, entirely original study of a suffering child and a family and marriage under siege. I know of no other book about madness whose claim to scientific knowledge is so modest and whose artistic achievement is so great.” - Janet Malcolm, author of The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes and The Journalist and the Murderer
“One of the most gripping and disturbingly honest books I have ever read. The courage Michael Greenberg shows in narrating the story of his adolescent daughters descent into psychosis is matched by his acute understanding of how alone each of us, sane or manic, is in our processing of reality and our attempts to get others to appreciate what seems important to us. This is a remarkable memoir.” - Phillip Lopate, author of Two Marriages and Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan
A native New Yorker, Michael Greenberg 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.
Erica Horne, April 17, 2009 (view all comments by Erica Horne)
Hurry Down Sunshine, by Michael Greenberg, is right up my alley. I am a nurse working with geriatric psyche patients, and I love a good memoir. The story is about Sally, the author's fifteen year old daughter. Diagnosed as Bipolar, she exhibited classic symptoms of the disease, albeit at a younger age than most. I read this book in a matter of hours, engrossed in the story from beginning to end. The author's extended family adds a cast of colorful characters to the story also. (I found the plight of the authors brother as captivating as Sally's saga...)
This could have been a story about the hopelessness of psyche patients and the ineptness of psychiatrists, therapists and others inevitably encountered when one reluctantly enters a mental health facility, but it wasn't that at all. The Greenberg's were lucky to find a doctor who used both therapy and pharmacology to treat their daughter's disease, and a positive outcome was had. The author went to unusual lengths himself to learn more about the drugs his daughter was prescribed, and you have to applaud him for that also. I enjoyed the book and recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about Bipolar Disorder, or someone looking for a good weekend read.
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With that perfect opening line author Michael Greenberg draws us into his bewildering summer 12 years ago, when he and his family learned more than they wanted to know about the frustrating world of mental illness. He writes with a more literate pen than many, in this age of books written at the sixth-grade reading level, and does so with enough feeling that I got to know these people well enough that I wish his book were twice as long. If that's my only complaint, you know I have to rate this as one of the best books I've read in years.
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Shoshana, November 15, 2008 (view all comments by Shoshana)
Greenberg's memoir of his teen daughter's first bipolar manic episode is both engaging and problematic.
"Engaging" because of Greenberg's ability to tell the tale with emotion and immediacy. This wrenching family narrative is well worth reading to understand a parent's experience of extremely difficult and frightening events. It appears that Greenberg's daughter and family received inadequate and indifferent treatment, which is extremely troubling. His description of the events and their effects on his family is wrenching and raw.
"Problematic" first because Greenberg presents the story angrily. This is understandable and certainly warranted given the circumstances, but over the course of the book, the reader's impression is that Greenberg is angry in general. He describes the lack of adequate care his daughter received, and in the absence of context, I assume his report is accurate. However, he doesn't describe which interventions his daughter does receive, and when he alludes later to the course of her recovery from this episode, he is silent on whether he believes that her hospitalization and therapy were helpful. In many descriptions of his and his family's life, he accentuates the negative, which raises some concerns about the potential narrowness of his focus. Greenberg is trying to be clear and brutally honest about himself, but sometimes just seems brutal.
Further, Greenberg makes some puzzling errors that may speak both to his confusion and a lack of adequate editing. For example, he refers several times to "narcoleptics." He means "neuroleptics," a category of antipsychotic medication. "Narcoleptic" means a person with narcolepsy, a neurological sleep disorder. Unfortunately this error occurs several times; in and of itself this would just be unfortunate, but in conjunction with other areas of lack of clarity, it makes me wonder how well Greenberg and his family understood his daughter's treatment. Treatment can be confusing under the best of circumstances, and I would have no problem with a description of how confusing this experience was. However, it's not obvious whether Greenberg ever got clarity on this. Greenberg expresses his frustration that medical people do not know what causes bipolar disorder, a frustration that is, in fact, shared by many practitioners. However, Greenberg seems to have an ambivalent relationship with the idea that this disorder may be biologically based, often describing his shame and worry that he caused his daughter's bipolar disorder. Other family members worry that they, too contributed to the problem, and ruminate about the stigma associated with mental illness. One would expect that part of this story would be the family's realization that accepting this stigma is unreasonable, and the information that they were radicalized by this experience in some way. However, Greenberg does not report this, which seems to me to imply that he accepts the legitimacy of that stigma, and that a primarily biological description (if not explanation) of bipolar disorder is not sufficient for him. He still seems to see the origin of his daughter's illness as interpersonal or psychodynamic. While relational stress is often a contributor to increased symptoms and decreased functioning, a review of the research literature would show that stress and dysharmony are not sufficient to cause bipolar disorder in the absence of a biological substrate. The omission of this information seems strange to me given that Greenberg is a journalist and presumably is able to do his own background reading, call sources who could answer questions, etc. It again raises the question of where his editor was. The overall effect is of a story without a point, at least so far as the narrator's or his daughter's development or learning. In this way, its structure is that of a case report, not a plot.
Because the problems outweigh the benefits of this narrative, I would not recommend it for people or families trying to understand bipolar disorder. I would not assign it for a class on diagnosis, but might in a class focused on disconnections between families and providers.
For a more accurate and more nuanced report on bipolar disorder, read Jamison's An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. Jamison describes her own bipolar disorder, and, as one of the major contributors to the scientific research on bipolar disorder, characterizes the diagnosis both more accurately and more hopefully.
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Product details
240 pages
Other Press -
English9781590511916
Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Greenberg, a columnist for London's Times Literary Supplement, was living in Greenwich Village in 1996 when his 15-year-old daughter, Sally, suddenly became manic, importuning strangers and ranting in the streets about her newfound cosmic wisdom. She was a danger to herself and others, so her father and stepmother had her committed to a psychiatric facility. Greenberg was no stranger to mental illness; he'd been caring for his dysfunctional brother most of their adult lives. Still, Sally was so brilliant, so caring, he couldn't bear the thought of her ending up like his brother. During the 24 long days Sally spent in the hospital, Greenberg learned to cope. He watched a Hasidic family visiting with their mentally ill young man. He pondered his ex-wife going to cuddle with Sally, as if she were still a little girl. He listened to his mother explain her troubled marriage and the subsequent mental illness of his brother. He wondered at his present wife's resilience. After Sally's discharge, questions of how they would adjust to their new lives were complicated in very different ways. In this well-written and sincere memoir, Greenberg proves to be a caring man trying to find his way through the minefield of a loved one's madness. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review"
by Booklist (Starred Review),
"Greenberg...writes with unflinching honesty and heart....[A] startling piece of writing, by turns sobering and surreal."
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"[V]ivid yet surprisingly detached prose....Bears enlightening and articulate witness to the sheer force of an oft-misunderstood disease."
"Review"
by Library Journal (Starred Review),
"[E]legiac, beautifully crafted....Sure to become a new classic in the literature of mental illness; highly recommended."
"Synopsis"
by Random,
HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE TELLS THE STORY OF THE extraordinary summer when, at the age of fifteen, Michael Greenbergs daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sallys visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the citys most sweltering months. “I feel like Im traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine. Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her-her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenbergs unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.
“The psychotic break of his fifteen-year-old daughter is the grit around which Michael Greenberg forms the pearl that is Hurry Down Sunshine. It is a brilliant, taut, entirely original study of a suffering child and a family and marriage under siege. I know of no other book about madness whose claim to scientific knowledge is so modest and whose artistic achievement is so great.” - Janet Malcolm, author of The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes and The Journalist and the Murderer
“One of the most gripping and disturbingly honest books I have ever read. The courage Michael Greenberg shows in narrating the story of his adolescent daughters descent into psychosis is matched by his acute understanding of how alone each of us, sane or manic, is in our processing of reality and our attempts to get others to appreciate what seems important to us. This is a remarkable memoir.” - Phillip Lopate, author of Two Marriages and Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan
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