Thawing out the mind with a trip to the dark side

As Highland Park's protective coat of ice yields to the crocuses, thaw out with some books that display the reality beyond the facade.

Several bookclubs have picked up memoirs that expose raw emotions, shattered marriages and conquering manic-depressive illness; others took to the road with travel writers who have searched to the ends of the earth to find cultural icons, lonely paradises, and altered perceptions.

A Box of Darkness: The Story of a Marriage (2011)
Sally Ryder Brady

Just as the world is again mesmerized by another storybook wedding in Westminster, romantic young brides can heed this work of warning from a young woman married in the early 1960's. On the cover of her frightening memoir is a perky young thing, dressed in her dream-come-true white confection, standing next to her Prince Charming, who rakishly nurses a cigarette. As you read Sally Ryder Brady's account, you realize how foolish and naive some brides were in the 1960s.

 

And, as her husband accuses, Kate Brady might have "enjoyed playing the victim." Not only was Upton Brady (who at the height of his publishing career was director of the Atlantic Monthly Press) an alcoholic and a homosexual, he aimed his bitterness at her. The chapters move back and forth between their meeting in the mid 1950s at her debutante ball, and his death in 2008. Then begins her search for answers about his two separate worlds, one as a religious Catholic and family man and the other on gay beaches, bars and late night rendez-vous. It's interesting to note that the bride claims to have tried to break off the engagement and the groom's hysterical reaction to "not being able to live without her.' The question is, how was he able to live with himself? The short book moves quickly, and poses some interesting questions about how well we know our spouses, before and after the vows.

 

Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign (2004)
Pico Iyer

To Pico Iyer, "travel" means to become a foreigner, to journey out of the familiar, and most importantly, out of ourselves. Travel begins in the mind, it begins with jet lag, it can leave us depressed. This is not your father's travel book and Iyer, who is Indian by blood, and English by upbringing, formerly educated in Oxford, is the eternal foreigner. About the merging of east and west in language in India today, he tells us, "Indian English, when it is not overly formal, comes at you with the fatal tinkle of an advertising man who's got his hands on the Ten Commandments: there's always a trace of sententiousness in it, and yet the lofty sentiments are placed inside the jingly singsong of a children's ditty."

Some of the short writings are travel essays, some are book reviews for the likes of Franz Kafka, W. G.Sebald, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Still others are personality pieces on the Dalai Lama, exiled for life from Tibet but still preaching kindness; and Leonard Cohen, who as a Buddhist is forever trying to lose his ego (so far, without success). Perhaps his most touching perception is about W. G. Sebald's novel, The Emigrants. "Its subject is really the people who are forced out of one world and yet never really arrive in another, and so pass their days as specters of a kind, not really living and not really dead."

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)
Kay Redfield Jamison

Kay Redfield Jamison is a professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, co-author of the standard medical text, and an expert on manic-depressive disease. So why is this a memoir? Dr. Jamison is herself a victim of the disease. She's also a survivor who has ridden the rollercoaster of rejecting -- and eventually accepting -- treatment that has saved her life and allowed her to flourish in her career. This is a very personal story and also a primer for anyone interested in what the disease feels like from the inside. It chronicles the incredible surges of energy a manic phase generates, and the soon-to-follow overflow of perceptions drowning the patient

Dr. Jamison is diagnosed just as she has completed her Ph.D. and is hired as an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry. This coincides with her most severe bout of mania, one that she no longer controls but is destroying her marriage, friendships, and possibly her career. Her journey is worth reading and discussing in a book group. It is fascinating to hear what a high percentage of doctors, academics, musicians, authors, and artists suffer within this illness.