Hurry Down Sunshine

June 23, 2008
Greenberg, a columnist for London’s Times Literary Supplement
, was living in Greenwich Village in 1996 when his 15-year-old daughter, Sally, suddenly became manic, importuning strangers and ranting in the streets about her newfound cosmic wisdom. She was a danger to herself and others, so her father and stepmother had her committed to a psychiatric facility. Greenberg was no stranger to mental illness; he’d been caring for his dysfunctional brother most of their adult lives. Still, Sally was so brilliant, so caring, he couldn’t bear the thought of her ending up like his brother. During the 24 long days Sally spent in the hospital, Greenberg learned to cope. He watched a Hasidic family visiting with their mentally ill young man. He pondered his ex-wife going to cuddle with Sally, as if she were still a little girl. He listened to his mother explain her troubled marriage and the subsequent mental illness of his brother. He wondered at his present wife’s resilience. After Sally’s discharge, questions of how they would adjust to their new lives were complicated in very different ways. In this well-written and sincere memoir, Greenberg proves to be a caring man trying to find his way through the minefield of a loved one’s madness.

Starred review from July 15, 2008
"Times Literary Supplement" (UK) columnist Greenberg's elegiac, beautifully crafted memoir chronicles the summer his teenaged daughter, Sally, lost her mind to madness. In it, Greenberg observes the experience and its effect on everyone involved with meticulous care. At times acutely painful, at times painfully funny, his story alternates between the progression of Sally's bewildering, frightening decline and Greenberg's own at times comically absurd experience as he simultaneously deals with a dependent brother suffering from his own demons; a difficult, obtuse wife; and a New Age ex-wife who, after each visit, offers cosmic explanations for her daughter's condition before retreating to her home in the country. Characters from the psychiatric ward where Sally spends nearly a month are often indistinguishable in their strangeness from the doctors themselves, giving the atmosphere of the hospital a hauntingly surrealistic air. The whole effect is one of a wrathful storm passing through Greenberg's life, turning every relationship upside down as it shattered any semblance of inner peace in both father and daughter and destroyed their ability to communicate at the time. Sure to become a new classic in the literature of mental illness; highly recommended for all public libraries.Elizabeth Brinkley, Granite Falls, WA

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2008
Summertime, and the living is easy, but not for Greenberg, whose 15-year-old daughter, Sally, has a psychotic break on the steamy streets of Greenwich Village. In this compelling memoir, Greenberg traces Sallys harrowing journey: her admission to a psychiatric ward; diagnosis of bipolar disorder (a relief for Greenberg, who feared the forbidding label of schizophrenia); and finally her adjustment, with the help of a truckload of medication, to a life forever changed. Greenberg, divorced from Sallys New-Agey mother, Robin, and now remarried to more matter-of-fact Pat, must hold his family together as Sally falls apart. (In his darkest moments, he fears that his daughters life will go the way of his mentally unbalancedand barely independentolder brother, Steve.) Greenberg, a native New Yorker and columnist for the Times Literary Supplement, writes with unflinching honesty and heart. He brilliantly renders daily life in a Manhattan psych ward inhabited by a manic professor, a mango-devouring flirt, and an Orthodox Jewish man whose family members interpret his madness as a sort of communication with God. He even takes a dose of his daughters medication to try to understand her state of mind. The result is a startling piece of writing, by turns sobering and surreal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)