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Darkness Visible: A Memoir Of Madness

Darkness Visible: A Memoir Of Madness

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A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.

Publishers Weekly

A meditation on Styron's ( Sophie's Choice ) serious depression at the age of 60, this essay evokes with detachment and dignity the months-long turmoil whose symptoms included the novelist's ``dank joylessness,'' insomnia, physical aversion to alcohol (previously ``an invaluable senior partner of my intellect'') and his persistent ``fantasies of self-destruction'' leading to psychiatric treatment and hospitalization. The book's virtues--considerable--are twofold. First, it is a pitiless and chastened record of a nearly fatal human trial far commoner than assumed--and then a literary discourse on the ways and means of our cultural discontents, observed in the figures of poet Randall Jarrell, activist Abbie Hoffman, writer Albert Camus and others. Written by one whose book-learning proves a match for his misery, the memoir travels fastidiously over perilous ground, receiving intimations of mortality and reckoning delicately with them. Always clarifying his demons, never succumbing to them in his prose, Styron's neat, tight narrative carries the bemusement of the worldly wise suddenly set off-course--and the hard-won wisdom therein. In abridged form, the essay first appeared in Vanity Fair. (Sept.)

Author : William Styron

Publisher : Vintage

Published Year : 1992

Edition : 1

Format : Paperback, 84 pages

Dimensions : 5.17 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.25 (d)

ISBN : 0679736395

ISBN13 : 9780679736394


Overview :

A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.

A great novelist describes his devastating descent into depression, taking the reader on an unprecedented journey into the realm of madness. The author of Sophie's Choice was overtaken by persistent insomnia and a troubling sense of malaise--the first signs of a deep depression that would soon engulf his life and leave him on the brink of suicide.

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