Synopses & Reviews
Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase while others, hunched over a keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing?
In The Midnight Disease, neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the drive to write, what sparks it, and what extinguishes it. Flaherty, who herself has grappled with episodes of compulsive writing and block, offers a brave and compelling personal account of a fascinating condition. As in Lauren Slater's Prozac Diary and Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, "the power of this work comes from Flaherty's being a first-class writer who has lived this story" (Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country).
Dissecting the role of emotion and the ways in which neurological and mood disorders can lead to meager or prodigious creative output, Flaherty draws on examples from case studies and from the lives of writers, from Franz Kafka to Anne Lamott, Sylvia Plath to Stephen King.
Review
"Simplistic notions like the one that says creativity is a function of the right side of the brain go out the window, to be replaced by complex, yet entirely plausible, correlations between brain states and creative acts." David Pitt, Booklist
Review
"[Flaherty] is the real thing...and her writing magically transforms her own tragedies into something strange and whimsical almost, almost funny." The Washington Post Book World
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"The Midnight Disease remains a signal achievement, providing remarkable dividends for readers interested in the human brain and artistic creativity." Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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"This is interesting, heated stuff." The San Francisco Chronicle
Synopsis
Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase, while others, hunched over a notepad or keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (Houghton Mifflin, January), neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the hows and whys of writing, revealing the science behind hypergraphia -- the overwhelming urge to write -- and its dreaded opposite, writer's block. The result is an innovative contribution to our understanding of creative drive, one that throws new light on the work of some of our greatest writers. A neurologist whose work puts her at the forefront of brain science, Flaherty herself suffered from hypergraphia after the loss of her prematurely born twins. Her unique perspective as both doctor and patient helps her make important connections between pain and the drive to communicate and between mood disorders and the creative muse. Deftly guiding readers through the inner workings of the human brain, Flaherty sheds new light on popular notions of the origins of creativity, giving us a new understanding of the role of the temporal lobes and the limbic system. She challenges the standard idea that one side of the brain controls creative function, and explains the biology behind a visit from the muse. Flaherty writes compellingly of her bout with manic hypergraphia, when -the sight of a computer keyboard or a blank page gave me the same rush that drug addicts get from seeing their freebasing paraphernalia.- Dissecting the role of emotion in writing and the ways in which brain-body and mood disorders can lead to prodigious -- or meager -- creative output, Flaherty uses examples from her own life and the lives of writers from Kafka to Anne Lamott, from Sylvia Plath to Stephen King: * Fyodor Dostoevsky, the author of nineteen novels and novellas and voluminous notebooks, diaries, and letters, suffere
Synopsis
Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase while others, hunched over a keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease, neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the mysteries of literary creativity: the drive to write, what sparks it, and what extinguishes it. She draws on intriguing examples from medical case studies and from the lives of writers, from Franz Kafka to Anne Lamott, from Sylvia Plath to Stephen King. Flaherty, who herself has grappled with episodes of compulsive writing and block, also offers a compelling personal account of her own experiences with these conditions.
About the Author
Alice Weaver Flaherty is a young doctor, a neurologist, who has gone from a summa cum laude degree at Harvard, to a PhD from MIT, to an MD from Harvard Medical School, to a position as chief resident in neurology (in her early thirties) at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is now staff neurologist and "where I surreptitiously do a lot of writing." She sees patients regularly, specializes in the innovative technique of deep brain stimulators, and is the author of a number of scientific papers on the brain's representation of the body. She lives with her husband and twin daughters in Cambridge, Mass.