Publisher: Harper Collins
Year: 2008
Synopsis: The transcendent and groundbreaking memoir of a father's courageous journey to understand his daughter's mental illness At the age of 15, during one long and difficult summer, Michael Greenberg's daughter, Sally, was struck mad. Her visionary crack-up occurred on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continued, among other places, in the lost-in-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city's most sweltering months. "I feel like I'm travelling and travelling with nowhere to go back to," Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling toward insanity. Hurry Down Sunshine is Greenberg's journey to comprehend mental illness and his own family, and to rescue his daughter from her desperate downward spiral. With touching honesty and intimacy, he reveals Sally's effect on those closest to her--her brother, her grandmother, her mother and her stepmother--and, finally, on himself. Greenberg's memorable gallery of characters includes a surprisingly unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish mental patient and a manic classics professor. Unsentimental, nuanced and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine is a transcendent memoir about mental illness and the restorative power of one father's love for his daughter.
What Others Have to Say:
New York Times
"What sets “Hurry Down Sunshine” apart from the great horde of mediocre memoirs, with their sitcom emotions and too neatly resolved fights and reconciliations, is Greenberg’s frank pessimism, dark humor and fundamental incapacity to make sense of his daughter’s ordeal, let alone to derive an uplifting moral from it."
The Seattle Times
"Greenberg deftly shows that sometimes the ones who bear the "stigma" of a diagnosis can possess potent distillations of truth, while others who move about in the "real world" seem to have only a marginal grasp on reality."
The Globe and Mail
""Hurry Down Sunshine" is not just a book about a girl gone mad, it's about the fierce love of a father for a daughter."
Star Tribune
"...thought-provoking memoir of his daughter's first episode of full-blown bipolar mania."
The Washington Post
"Greenberg's writing is so effective that it somehow removes the sense of shock one might have about a father taking a dose of his daughter's mood stabilizers, as Greenberg does in an effort to get closer to what Sally is feeling."
The New Yorker
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