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Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Next time, keep the kid
Title: The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Author: Kim Edwards
In The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Norah Henry goes into labor three weeks early and during a snowstorm. As a result, they are unable to make it to the hospital, and David Henry, an orthopedic surgeon, is left to do the delivery with the help of his nurse, Caroline.
At first surprised and then dismayed by the delivery of a second child, a girl with Down syndrome, David makes a rash decision he will regret the rest of his life. He hands the child off to the nurse with instructions to take her to a home, not an uncommon thing to have done in the 60s. Caroline, secretly in love with David, attempts to do so. However, she finds the home to be a horrible place and opts to raise the child herself. She quickly leaves town and creates a new life in Pittsburgh.
Instead of the truth, David tells Norah that she had a second, stillborn child. This lie wreaks havoc on their lives - creating a wall between them and complicating the relationship with their healthy firstborn son. Caroline sends pictures and letters to David as his daughter, Phoebe, grows but David cannot bring himself to tell his wife the truth and reunite their family.
A well-written novel, but one that I wouldn't necessarily recommend. I read to escape, and when a novel feels very real and the characters have dreary miserable lives - well, there just has to be something better out there to read.Labels: depression, fiction
posted by Kate at
6:01 PM
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Friday, November 23, 2007
Really, Nora?
Title: High Noon
By: Nora Roberts
This is apparently her latest hardcover release. Nora seems to be hurting for major plot development points, since she threw one in here that I was not a fan of.
Phoebe, a hostage negotiator for the Savanna police department, meets Duncan when she's talking one of his former employees out of jumping off a roof. Romance ensues. She's got a kid and an agoraphobic mother. He's a lottery-winner, though she wasn't aware of it because it happened during the kid's birth.
And someone's messing with her. She dresses down a uniformed officer for subordination, and (this is the part I wasn't a fan of) he attacks her in the stairwell at work and fingers her.
When it seems like someone's out to get her on several instances after that, he's naturally the first suspect, but it turns out that some lunatic wants revenge because of a hostage she didn't manage to save.
The big climax takes place in a jewelry store where Duncan was heading to buy an engagement ring; his surrogate sister and mother are already there, for consultation. Plus the asshole former cop (he was fired) works there as a security guard. And Phoebe has to prevent the crazy (who has a Gary Cooper complex of some sort, hence the title High Noon) from learning her connection to some of the hostages and killing everyone. She obviously succeeds, since failing would put a bit of a damper on her relationship with Duncan, and the crazy is taken out by a sniper, and then she and Duncan get married.
Not the most satisfying book. I was with her until the rape, then wondered why Nora had to take what should be a feel-good trashy romance and make it a bit too graphic and real-life. Eh.Labels: depression, hunky armed forces or government operatives, romantic "suspense", tragedy, western
posted by ket at
11:41 AM
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Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Depression
Title: Prozac Nation
Author: Elizabeth Wurtzel
This book has been on my reading list for years - probably since early undergrad at least, and I have finally gotten around to reading it.
It is the true story of a severely depressed young woman, who, in the deepest moments of depression, doesn't get out of bed for days, doesn't shower for weeks, is committed to hospitals, and so much more that epitomizes deep-seated depression.
She blames her parents' divorce when she was very young for much of her depression. Not really the divorce so much as the ensuing battles afterwards. At times her psychologists and psychiatrists contact her father, who has excellent health care benefits, to tell him that Elizabeth is in desperate need of therapy and if he would pay for it, she'd surely have a chance of getting better. Even then, despite the fact that his insurance would cover 90% of the cost, he refuses repeatedly on the grounds that it's her mother's job to pay that cost. Her mother does not have good health care, nor often a full time job.
His daughter is sick and suicidal and it's still a war between the parents.
Divorce is awful and all, but far worse is a situation in which the child is put in the middle, in which the child is made to go from parent to parent trying to solve things, in which the child's needs are not put before the parents' needs. This book very clearly shows the effects that situation can have.
Also very interesting in this book is the very end - Prozac has come out and Elizabeth has finally been given a prescription after more than a decade of battling severe depression. She writes of the overabundance of Prozac prescriptions that shot up not long after, often given out by doctors who spent less than 3 minutes talking to patients before writing the prescription. She addresses the trivialization of depression and the drugs used to treat it. It becomes so commonplace. At one point she learned that 6 million Americans had taken Prozac. If I had to sum up her feelings about the drug, it's that for far too many, Prozac has become the first treatment method, instead of a last resort as it was for her.
This was a decade ago, but what about today? Are we still taking Prozac or other antidepressants too quickly, too lightly, too easily? It's a good question. I wonder what today's statistics show about the number of people on some form of antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication.Labels: depression
posted by Kate at
10:36 AM
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