In Love With Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery [Paperback]

Wilfrid Sheed (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1999

A distinguished man of letters culls wisdom from his encounters with illness and addiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Noted critic, novelist and essayist Sheed recounts his recovery from three major illnesses in this highly personal, torturous, oddly exhilarating chronicle. The first illness, polio, struck in 1945 when he was 14. With unbridled optimism, Sheed struggled for years with a disease that "seemed much more like a vacation from the pains of growing up than an addition to them." The book's centerpiece, his plunge into depression triggered by addiction to sleeping pills and alcohol in his mid-50s, unfolds a nightmare of panic attacks, manic highs, proliferating phobias and suicidal dementia. Sheed found scant relief through a stay in a sanatorium, antidepressants or lithium, on all of which he heaps scorn. His recovery seemed to follow its own logic and inner mechanisms of healing. Diagnosed with cancer in 1991, he underwent operations of the tongue and neck, as well as radiation treatments, a two-year ordeal he describes with wit and gallantry.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Novelist Reynolds Price (A Whole New Life, LJ 3/1/94) battled spinal cancer; essayist Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face, LJ 7/94) struggled to restore her disfigured face; writer Gretel Ehrlich (A Match to the Heart, Pantheon, 1994) survived being struck by lightning; author Paul West (A Stroke of Genius, LJ 11/1/94) endured a string of illnesses. Critic Sheed (Essays in Disguise, LJ 3/1/90) joins his literary colleagues with this memoir of his recovery from childhood polio, depression caused by pill and alcohol addiction, and cancer. However, his rambling, tortuous musings lack the emotional power of the other works, and the reader often wishes Sheed would get to the point. Saying very little about his bouts with polio and cancer, Sheed focuses mostly on his effort to overcome his addictions; he has no kind words for psychiatrists, 12-step programs, and "Happy Valley" sanatoriums. Still, his saving grace is humor and optimism in the face of disaster. For larger collections.
-?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 252 pages
• Publisher: Akadine Pr; First Edition edition (June 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888173874
• ISBN-13: 978-1888173871
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,023,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gamer If Not a Master Player--Unique and Important, December 21, 2002

By 

Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: In Love With Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery (Paperback)

A memoir in which Sheed, an avid sports fan, takes on three worthy opponents--polio, addiction, and cancer--and not only stays in the ring with each but emerges triumphant. But the book's uniqueness and value is not easily summed up. Sheed's accomplishment is to take the reader into a place where all of the counselors, physicans and self-help gurus rarely arrive, and he does so without a trace of self-pity, moralizing, or exhibitionism. He uses his own experience to dissect addiction with an acute awareness, concentrated focus and indeed critical objectivity that practically make the book required reading for the layman and medical professional alike.

The writing is crisp, precise and direct, always nibbling at the edges of irony and paradox and capable of surprising in every sentence. Admittedly, some addictive personalities might not recognize themselves in Sheed's ironic, commonsensical narrator and consequently be put off from playing his game. Other readers will find it hard to put the book down, even though their own experiences may bear little resemblance to the narrator's. Rather than take us through the valley of despair, Sheed practically acknowledges depression as a "given," indicating that a writer like William Styron ("Darkness Visible") has already covered this territory. Sheed's focus, rather, is on the "other side" of the illness, where the narrator's wit and dogged perseverance are more than a match for the worst that life can deal him.

Not that Sheed takes depression lightly or, thank God, his own competencies very seriously. But he wants his reader to know that even apart from religious faith and popular therapies "depression ends" and "if you can just hang in there, avoiding downer-uppers and upper-downers, whether you're addicted to them or not, life will eventually make it up to you." Pronouncements such as this come off not as glib advice but as eloquent and "earned" observations based on the evidence of the narrator's meticulously represented experiences.

Whether due to his non-American birthplace, his residual Catholicism, or his initial encounter with an "external" foe like polio, Sheed's narrator has few regrets about anything--wasted time (30 years of alcohol and pills), neglected friends and relatives, or even any of his afflictions (a word he would probably resist--"challenges," maybe). The closest thing to an "antagonist" in the book is A.A., whose absolutist pronouncements and homogenizing practices could not help but rub an independent mind and feisty spirit like Sheed's the wrong way.

The result is a book that neither the author nor those close to him need have any morning-after regrets about. For the reader it's an experience guaranteed to produce no tears--unless from laughter over the narrator's numerous predicaments and felicitous verbal counterpunches. The book offers not only a celebration of life (and of writing) but a character you would love to meet and chat with--about baseball, booze, broads, Duke Ellington, or just about anything else that comes to mind.

(In the new edition Sheed's afterword indicates that on the day of his book's publication he was subjected to removal of part of his jaw. Apparently the game is in extra innings, but count on this combative player to get at least three good cuts at the ball. If he doesn't, you can bet the umpire will hear about it.)

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Refreshing Shot of Humor at the AA Crowd, December 7, 2000

By 

Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Love with Daylight (Hardcover)

Sheed goes through Hell and back and back again and again in this book: Polio, drug and alcohol addictions and cancer. Yet, he manages to maintain his wry sense of humor throughout. This ability is especially significant when he is sent to what he drolly refers to as "Happy Valley," an AA-based recovery center, to cure him of his addictions. Because, as Sheed points out in the chapter (again drolly) entitled "Notes on a Brainwashing," without a sense of humor, the thinking man (or woman) is doomed in such a program. Unfortunately, neither Sheed nor his doctors nor I, for that matter, who freely admit to having gone through a Happy Valley experience of my own, know of any such centers that are not AA based. It's sort of an easy way out for the medical and psychological professions. Since nobody knows what causes addictions, the meetings serve as an almost cost-free way to deal with the situation. So, like Pontius Pilate, they wash their hands of the patients, like Sheed and myself, and send them forth into a 12-step Orwellian wasteland. I'm not going to dwell on everything that's wrong with AA. This is a book review, not a speech made from a soapbox in Hyde park. But, suffice it to say, as Sheed points out: 1.) If you so much as question the AA model, you are in Denial-Catch 22. 2.) The "Blue Book" on which the program is based, states that those who are unable or unwilling to follow their program are "such unfortunates, constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves." Sheed and I are such unfortunates. That's why I bought this book after reading a review of it in the New York Review of Books. We dishonest folks have to stick together. Sheed's rapier wit and dumbfoundedness at the sheer inanity of what he was going through at his Happy Valley tickled me so that I reread those chapters again and again, just to make sure that there WAS another sane person who had gone through such an experience. Among other remarks, he calls his tenacious AA group leader "Rover" because of his insistence that everyone swallow the AA program whole, pointedly questions the AA slogan to "Keep Coming Back" until you "get with it," astutely noting that if you hang around any crazy idea long enough some of its bound to rub off on you (When I was in my Happy Valley, it occurred to me that this tactic was something the Nazis, those masters of group psychology, would have put to effective use: "Just come to a few more rallies at Nuremburg, you'll see!")and observes that the claims that the program works is belied by the number of Happy Valley patients who had been there before, several times! I had the same experience. To sum up, I recommend this book to all those poor souls out there who went through Happy Valley experiences and thought (as I did, and do) that they were the only ones who thought something queer was going on. It was, and the book will be an uplifting and enlightening read. I'm sure polio and cancer patients will benefit as well from the humor and love of life the author effuses. So why didn't I give this book five stars? Because all this droll cheerfulness is just a bit much. The book becomes monotone, and Sheed therefore becomes suspect. There are depths to be explored here that remain untouched. To explore those depths (only if you like, mind you), with just as much drollery as Sheed's to keep you hopping along, I recommend Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, one of the greatest works of the 20th century.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Biography With Philosophy, August 19, 2009

By 

Mitchell E. Davis (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: In Love With Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery (Paperback)

This book deals with the author's battles with polio early in life,and with depression and alcoholism later in life.Toward the end of the book he deals with tongue cancer.His thoughts while dealing with these afflictions are interesting and at times inspiring.There might be some moments of tedious reading,but the philosophy he imparts during his challenges makes reading this book a rewarding experience.