This Close to Happy

A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of 2016"Despair is always described as dull," writes Daphne Merkin, "when the truth is that despairhas a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottledsilver." This Close to Happy—Merkin's rare, vividly personalaccount of what it feels like to suffer from clinicaldepression—captures this strange light.Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls "the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome." The arc of Merkin's affliction is lifelong, beginning in a childhood...