Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness

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A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Hurry Down Sunshine is an abnormal family story and a memoir of exceptional power. In it, Michael Greenberg recounts in vivid detail the remarkable summer when, at the age of fifteen, his daughter used to be struck mad. It begins with Sally’s sudden 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 All over the city’s most sweltering months. This is a tale of a family broken open, then painstakingly, movingly stitched together again.

Among Greenberg’s unforgettable cast of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary aspirations. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine is very important reading in the literature of affliction alongside classics such as Girl, Interrupted and An Unquiet Mind.
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: Michael Greenberg’s spare, unflinching memoir begins with a bang: “On July 5, 1996, my daughter used to be struck mad.” Hurry Down Sunshine chronicles the summer when fifteen-year-old Sally experienced her first full-blown manic episode—an event that in a “single stroke” changed her identity and, by extension, that of her entire family. Simply told and beautifully written, Greenberg’s memoir shines a stark light on mental illness, painting a vivid picture of a brain and body under siege—mania as a separate living thing squatting within the patient. As a creator who lives “such a lot in his head,” Greenberg is particularly anguished by his daughter’s fractured psyche, and his honesty about being both sickened and fascinated by his daughter’s condition is breathtaking: “All over the worst moments, I think of her as my disease—the disease I should bear…I am intoxicated with Sally’s madness in both senses of the word: drunk and poisoned.” So desperate is he to have in mind her, that he relentlessly researches mental illness (the book is peppered with fascinating insights into drug therapy and anecdotes about writers who struggled with madness), and even goes so far as to sample a full dose of his daughter’s medication. Startling, heart-wrenching, and yet unwaveringly unsentimental, Hurry Down Sunshine is an unforgettable story of a young girl’s descent into madness, told through the eyes of a harried and helpless father trying desperately to bring her back. –Daphne Durham

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