In the Jaws of the Black Dogs: A Memoir of Depression [Hardcover]

John Bentley Mays (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 23, 1999

In this courageous memoir, John Bentley Mays gives us a riveting account of what it is to live in the shadow of debilitating depression.

Weaving intimate recollections with excerpts from the diaries he kept for thirty years, Mays illuminates the struggle that leads to breakdown and the uneasy truce achieved through psychotherapy. Along the way, he offers provocative commentary on the allure of cure, the cultural scripts of normality, and the distorting mirror of clinical language.

A literary tour de force that began with an award winning essay, In the Jaws of the Black Dogs is not an objective analysis composed from the safety of hindsight. It is a writer's attempt to evoke the silent and distorting malignancy--as well as the moments of reprieve--of the only life he has ever known. Above all, he offers readers hope: Although the black dogs cannot be entirely avoided, humor and the love and understanding of family and friends can keep the dogs at bay.

From In The Jaws of the Black Dogs

"This book is a life with the black dogs of depression. I have written it in a clearing bounded by thickets roamed by the killing dogs, sometimes wondering, in the writing, whether I would complete it before they returned on silent paws to snatch the text and me away. For the depressed can never be sure we can finish anything we begin, or indeed certain of anything, except the black dogs' eventual return, and their terrible circling of the clearing's edge.

"There are a great many books about depression. This is not one of them. It is pain written, not observed; a depressive writer's writing, a testament transcribed from wounded flesh to paper in the clearing, before the black dogs' inevitable return."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Reflecting on a lifetime of chronic depression, Mays, the visual arts critic of Toronto's Globe and Mail, charts his illness with reasoned intelligence and emotional honesty. His chronicle, a bestseller in Canada, begins in the American South, where Mays grew up on a cotton plantation he remembers for its physical beauty and sullen silences. When he was seven, his alcoholic father died (perhaps by murder). He and his mother moved to a nearby city to which he was unable to adjust. Five years later, Mays's mother succumbed to lung cancer. He recalls not weeping, and acknowledges the self-annihilation manifest in his inability to express griefAindeed, suicide beckoned as a sweet possibility. He went to live with his paternal grandparents and was later, in high school, voted most likely to succeed. Mays pursued English studies in college and graduate school, aiming for a career as a scholar, imagining he could sustain himself in a world from which he felt increasingly estranged. In 1968, he attempted to kill himself while he was in a doctoral program, leading to his hospitalization and the first of two courses of therapyAwhich have enabled him to achieve periods of normality, though the dogs of depression always lurk. A strong religious faith, a solid marriage and his writing career have provided Mays with further emotional support. Though his prose can be so elliptical that some important events and figures (including his wife and step-daughter) slip through the gaps, implicit in Mays's story, as in William Styron's Darkness Visible, is his enduring courage in the face of unrelenting mental illness. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

First-person accounts of depression have become a cottage industry, with best sellers such as Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind (LJ 10/1/95), celebrity tell-alls like Patty Duke's Call Me Anna (1987), and serious literature like William Styron's Darkness Visible (LJ 8/90). Mays's entry in this crowded field is justified for two reasons. First, it is a fine literary effort, a best seller in Canada, where it was first published in 1995. Second, Mays is by no means curedAdespite years of psychotherapy and treatment with Prozac, he is still chronically depressed. This account is a good corrective to the many accountsAincluding those aboveAwritten after depression had lifted or been tamed by treatment. This is not an easy book to read. It offers no happy ending and conveys an all-too-vivid picture of enervation and self-loathing. Nonetheless, it is recommended for public libraries serving the many individuals who have friends or relatives battling depression and for academic libraries serving training programs in clinical psychology or psychiatry.
-AMary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, WA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1ST edition (June 23, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060192887
• ISBN-13: 978-0060192884
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,168,223 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From a Painfully Depressed Mind Comes a Warm & Honest Book!, October 17, 2005

By 

Aimee Thor "Aimee Thor" (Xenia, Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In the Jaws of the Black Dogs: A Memoir of Depression (Hardcover)

I related to so many areas of John Bentley's life. As I read this book I was touched and inspired, and reminded that I am not alone in my perpetual existential crisis. A more refreshing look at depression has not come along in many years. A truly beautiful book that could save lives!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Letting the Dogs Out, October 1, 2009

By 

Rose Keefe "author" (Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: In the Jaws of the Black Dogs: A Memoir of Depression (Hardcover)

John Bentley Mays, visual arts critic of the Globe and Mail, suffers from chronic depression. 'In the Jaws of the Black Dogs' is his memoir of a life spent fighting the illness and its attending influences: emotional numbness and self-destructive urges.

Mays was born in the American South and lost both parents at an early age: his alcoholic father died under suspicious circumstances in 1947 and lung cancer killed his mother five years later. He could not weep at her death, an early sign of the disorder that he refers to as the coming of the black dogs. In 1968 he attempted suicide, leading to hospitalization and therapy. A good marriage, successful writing career, and firm religious faith anchored Mays somewhat and gave him much-needed doses of normalcy, but the black dogs continue to circle him, ready to rush in and bite without warning.

This is not a self-help book for coping with depression. The introverted approach and elliptical writing style make it a healing tool for the writer, not the reader. It's also not especially uplifting: there's no happy ending and Mays even admits in the forward that he is writing the book "in a clearing bounded by thickets roamed by the killing dogs, sometimes wondering, in the writing, whether I would complete it before they returned on silent paws to snatch the text and me away." But 'In the Jaws of the Black Dogs' is a brave and honest story of courage in the face of crippling mental illness.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AN HONEST ACCOUNT BY ONE WHO ONLY LISTENS TO WAGNER, October 8, 2011

By 

G. Charles Steiner - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In the Jaws of the Black Dogs: A Memoir of Depression (Hardcover)

The following is an edited version from my journal of April 17, 2001 where I record my first impressions of reading John Bentley Mays's "In the Jaws of the Black Dogs" for the first (and only) time:

I picked up John Bentley Mays's book yesterday morning and read a good deal of it in bed and then after work, I continued reading it, till I finished it off tonight. This is the first book this month I've been able to read amid all the distractions and interruptions in my life without losing focus. Last year I read "Where the Roots Reach the Water" by Jeffrey Smith, another book by a depressed man on the subject of depression, but I find John Bentley Mays's book, published four years earlier than Smith's, decidedly not only the better written book but also the more honest.

A couple years back I found cited on the Internet John Bentley Mays's book warning scarily that all potential readers who read his book might find themselves plunged into a state of the severest depression. The website propagandized potential readers to read Smith's book instead since, it said, it was less likely to produce a state of depression while reading it. Well, I found John Bentley Mays's handling of the subject of depression completely even-handed whereas Smith's book cut out all ties with the state of depression since he claimed he already had achieved the status of being "among the cured."

John Bentley Mays, like myself, tried Prozac and found it worked only for a brief time. Mays accepted his life as a depressed person finally, having spent at least four decades trying to overcome it.

I did not really understand Mays's religious faith just as I did not understand it in Smith's book either. All the talk about Christ and the traditional religious fervency expressed, to me, served merely as rhetorical filagree or decoration. His belief in God, his faith, never helped him in his depression or in his struggles against it. It was not made evident to me in this book why he needed to cling to such a mirage that served him little, but like Jeffrey Smith in his book, John Bentley Mays found a good woman and he married. He married -- despite his confessed bisexual tendencies.

Like me, John Bentley Mays has also read his Emile M. Cioran, though, unlike me, he's been influenced by Michel Foucault and (the pro Nazi philosopher) Heidegger.

John Bentley Mays is forthright about his philosophical premises and influences, and he has tried very hard to make an earnest, honest account of his life.

From reading this book, I learned Mr. Mays is a well-read, educated man who has done his research into all the latest scientific studies and psychological theories regarding the mind and depression. John Bentley Mays concludes that depression is a normal, human response to a mad, insensitive, so-called Enlightened, modern world.

Interestingly, too, John Bentley Mays listens to the music of Wagner. That is to say, he listens ONLY to the music of Wagner.