Mockingbird Years

“During my years as a patient, I felt a guilty and unshakeable conviction that I was completely sane. Of course, my notion that patients were expected to be crazy was a naïve one, but I had swallowed whole the ideology that connects madness to beauty of spirit. In fact, I wasn’t interested in being happier, but in growing more poignantly, becomingly, meaningfully unhappy.”Here, in her own words, is Emily Fox Gordon, therapy veteran, sometime mental patient, and a Prize-winning essayist whose writing Rosellen Brown has praised as “acute and engaging, a combination of wit, rigor and deep feeling.” In this astounding memoir, she tells the story of her “therapeutic education,” marked by no fewer than five therapists before she turned seventeen. At eighteen, after a half-hearted suicide attempt, Gordon, mired in adolescent angst, began a three-year sojourn at the prestigious Austen Riggs sanitarium. It was at Riggs that Gordon was “rescued” by the maverick psychoanalyst Leslie Farber. Beautifully crafted, and startling in its observations of the therapeutic enterprise, Mockingbird Years is an auspicious debut by a major new talent.