25 & Trying

Hurry Down Sunshine

Hurry Down Sunshine, by Michael Greenberg

Greetings from San Francisco! I have just arrived in the city by the bay, and have just finished my first book in awhile. On the plane, I read an entire memoir. It was that good. I had never heard of the book, and had actually not purchased it. My mother lent me it from her vast library, and I took the opportunity to bring it along on my trip.

This memoir is a work of New Yorker Michael Greenberg, and the trials and tribulations of one particular summer where his daughter Sally “cracks up.” She has a major psychotic episode, and is admitted to a mental hospital in Manhattan.

The first thing I have to say about the work is that it is some of the most moving, innovative, and insightful memoir writing I have read in a long time. Usually, I have found memoirs interesting – but not because of the writing. It is usually because whatever happened to the writer is particularly amazing. They have run a marathon, or saved a nation, or something like that.

In this work, Greenberg makes his own personal trauma into something incredibly interesting – but not in a freakish, “Wow, his daughter went nuts!” way. It is more like, I wish I were friends with him. He seems incredibly smart, and incredibly loving. He also has issues – like everyone else. He struggles with the relationship between his brother Steve, who also suffers from mental illness, and the fate of his daughter.

Sally never actually gets a definitive diagnosis, which I think is precisely on par with the rest of the reader’s experience. Nothing is ever linear in real life, and her lack of diagnosis, and backtracking, and resistance to medicines, are all a part of reality – not glossed-over literary reality.

One of my favorite parts of the book is Greenberg’s relationship with his wife, Pat. She is a dancer and choreographer, and is Sally’s stepmother. This is a role she clearly struggles with, as she feels that Sally’s biological mother has certain rights in a crisis that she doesn’t possess. Greenberg has a hard time dealing with her role in all of this, and winds up having a fairly intense fight with her that is incredibly…realistic. There’s no other word for it. There are loud voices, a plethora of emotions, and sometimes things are said that make no sense. Pat goes on to work tirelessly on a dance piece that Sally watches when she returns home from the hospital. The piece is about her, and the struggle that a person with mental illness has to go through day-to-day.

This relationship is not the primary focus of the work – that designation goes to the relationship between a father and daughter. Sally and Michael are always fighting – through her psychotic episodes, as well as through her periods of calm.

When she is able to be brought home from the hospital, Michael doesn’t know what to do with her. He is unsure, afraid. She is like a time bomb, and he is afraid that he is in the blast range. Ultimately, she has a really amazing therapist (albeit, a bit strange) that gets her through. She is functioning, and he is there to witness this transformation.

In his postscript, Greenberg lets the reader in on what happened after this episode in Sally’s life. She was 15 when she “cracked up” and the postscript shows us that she is actually much older now. She has been married and divorced, and continues to struggle with her disease. She now lives with her biological mother in Vermont and works on farms. The most poignant effect is, however, that she asked her father to use her name in the book. She wanted to remain real.

Ultimately, his memoir is notable because of this closeness with reality. This is what makes it great, instead of interesting. It is what makes us want Sally to remain a figure in our lives as well.