Hurry Down Sunshine
by Michael Greenberg
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael GreenbergEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2008-09-09
ISBN: 1590511913
Number of pages: 234
Publisher: Other Press
Book Reviews of Hurry Down Sunshine
Book Review: You know, Sally has a point...
Summary: 5 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
When I originially ordered this novel I thought it was a work of fiction; that is, until I saw the word memoir on the cover. Since I'm so used to reading fiction, I had to continually remind myself that the people and the events in this story are real.
I learned much about psychosis reading this. I was under the impression that most people who are afflicted with a severe mental illness never showed any signs of recovery and were confined to a rubber room for life. But characters in the novel are constantly checked into and out of the psych ward, many returning for a second or third time. It seems that although many never reach the point where their psychosis is gone forever, they do reach lengthy periods of sanity and are allowed back into the world.
The back of the book describes the landlord as an unforgettable character, but I'd have to disagree. He's mentioned maybe three times in all. The most unforgettable character in the book is clearly the author's brother Steve. Steve is a very quiet and polite (although still extremely disturbed) fellow for decades, and suddenly becomes a foul-mouthed and vocally angry soul. In what I found to be the most amusing part of the story, he makes friends with some dope smoking bums off the street and invites them into his apartment. The author gives "impotent" threats to the fattest of the three friends ordering them to leave Steve alone, and the man (called Junior) simply takes a draught of alcohol in response, saying, "You don't need to worry. Because Junior's watching out for him now." I found myself laughing at the description of the scene, and again, had to remind myself that this event really happened and is not something to be laughed at.
In the middle of this story, I realized that I was born in the same year as the main character Sally. She should be somewhere around age 26 right now. This really puts things in perspective for me. I confess, sometimes I've considered myself so avant-garde that I'd be interested in dating someone with severe psychosis like Sally, but then again, I wouldn't want her to scratch my face up before she goes out into the street attempting to stop cars by dashing in front of them. That would be a lot to handle. She seems so sweet when her psychosis is in remission though. It's a shame, especially since I do kind of agree with her that we're all born geniuses and gradually lose our sense of genius as we get older. When I think about folks like J.M. Barrie, Walt Disney, Lewis Carroll, and Jesus, I'm convinced that young childern have some kind of magic inside their brains that most adults do not. If it wasn't for her overly-violent zeal for her genius of newborns idea, Sally probably wouldn't have ended up in a ward.
Even in her present state, I think Sally still has the potential to become a great artist or writer. Hopefully Mr. Greenberg can make enough money off this novel to give Sally the chance to publish her own ideas and promote her genius of children idea in a more suitable manner than she has done in the past. I wish her luck. And I wish that Steve fellow luck too, but I don't see him as the writing type.
Summary of Hurry Down Sunshine
HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE TELLS THE STORY OF THE extraordinary summer when, at the age of fifteen, Michael Greenberg?s daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally?s 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 during the city?s most sweltering months. ?I feel like I?m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,? Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine. Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her?her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenberg?s unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.?The psychotic break of his fifteen-year-old daughter is the grit around which Michael Greenberg forms the pearl that is Hurry Down Sunshine. It is a brilliant, taut, entirely original study of a suffering child and a family and marriage under siege. I know of no other book about madness whose claim to scientific knowledge is so modest and whose artistic achievement is so great.? ? Janet Malcolm, author of The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes and The Journalist and the Murderer
?One of the most gripping and disturbingly honest books I have ever read. The courage Michael Greenberg shows in narrating the story of his adolescent daughter?s descent into psychosis is matched by his acute understanding of how alone each of us, sane or manic, is in our processing of reality and our attempts to get others to appreciate what seems important to us. This is a remarkable memoir.? ? Phillip Lopate, author of Two Marriages and Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: Michael Greenberg's spare, unflinching memoir begins with a bang: "On July 5, 1996, my daughter was 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 writer who lives "so much 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: "During the worst moments, I think of her as my disease?the disease I must bear...I am intoxicated with Sally's madness in both senses of the word: inebriated and poisoned." So desperate is he to understand 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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