The Toolbox at LisaKiftTherapy.com

In the memoir,  Hurry Down Sunshine, Michael Greenberg invites you into a truly personal experience unlike anything most of us experience, the manic breakdown of his fifteen year old daughter one hot New York summer. 

I found myself fascinated, disturbed and ceaselessly sympathetic for the plight of this family as they all rallied around Sally during her lengthy inpatient stay in a Manhattan psyciatric ward and post recovery.  As a psychotherapist with little experience with this level of disturbance, I learned a lot about what goes on for people in the throes of psychosis.  As a reader, you get a first row seat in a play that no parent would ever want to wach a child of theirs star in.  According to the author, Hurry Down Sunshine provided a “missing link” in the literature available on bearing witness to psychosis – vs experiencing it first hand.  The subject matter is handled with dignity and penned brialliantly. 

Here are a few words by the author regarding his emotionally conflicted period just before Hurry Down Sunshine was published:

“With only a few weeks to go before publication, I sent a copy to Sally at Spring Lake Ranch, the therapeutic work community where she is currently living in the Green Mountains of Vermont. With growing anxiety, I had been putting this off. Sally had asked me to use her real name in the memoir, but that was without her knowing its contents. To harm her was the furthest thing from my mind, but, in a way, the very act of writing the book was a betrayal: I was exposing her psychosis, chronicling in detail what could have been painlessly left unsaid. “I’ve forgotten almost everything that happened that summer,” she told me. “Some merciful manic amnesia, I guess.” My descriptions of her — bristling uncontrollably, with her lips pressed fiercely together and her voice piercing me like a dart — were bound to throw her back to that awful time. At worst, it could trigger a fresh manic attack.”

Michael’s fears were not realized as Sally responded very favorably.

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Michael Greenberg is the author of Hurry Down Sunshine and a columnist for The Times Literary Supplement.  He’s also been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, Bomb, The Village Voice and The Boston Review.

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This mental health book review is by Lisa Brookes Kift, psychotherapist and creator of The Toolbox at LisaKiftTherapy.com.

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