Product Description

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. is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to herher 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, 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 . 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 and

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 byhis 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 isa remarkable memoir. Phillip Lopate, author of and