Like William Styron in Darkness Visible, Fiona Shaw, out of her suffering, has written a valuable and haunting memoir that is also an unforgettable work of literature.
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Amazon.com Review
In the tradition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic The Yellow Wall-Paper and Emily Holmes Coleman's novel The Shutter of Snow, Fiona Shaw's Composing Myself describes her contemporary experience with postpartum depression, a condition that, according to Harvard Medical School's Mental Health Newsletter, affects 10 to 20 percent of all new mothers. Shaw's story is no less harrowing than the 19th-century accounts of treatment, which most notably included the strict imprisonment called the "bed-rest cure." Shaw's confinements, like those of the protagonist in Gilman's story, were both physical and psychological. The act of writing this book helped Shaw to survive hospitalization, drugs, electric shock therapy, anorexia, and a poignant yearlong struggle to regain her former life and reconcile buried memories from her childhood.
From Publishers Weekly
This powerful, skillfully written memoir describes the year-long depression that afflicted the British author after childbirth. Shaw and her husband, Hugh, were delighted with their second daughter, when she suddenly became depressed and unable to function. She provides wrenching details of the hospitalization that followed, during which she attempted to starve herself and deliberately struck and cut her body. The electric-shock therapy prescribed for her resulted in so much memory loss that she began writing, both to recall her life and to find an explanation for her breakdown. Although Shaw attributes her collapse to postpartum depression, it's evident from her childhood recollections that the birth triggered and activated a longstanding mental distress. Emotionally torn between her divorced parents, Shaw pretended when she was 12 to have severe back pain that resulted in two unnecessary operations; later, she became seriously bulimic. She notes that her writing is a process to recovery that psychiatric treatments were unable to cure, and she is now working on her first novel.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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