In this small but deep memoir by journalist Michael Greenberg we get a bare-all look at his experience of his daughter's first psychotic break, leading to her bipolar diagnosis and years of struggle for sanity. Greenberg, in the style of the great Joan Didion, sticks to the facts, but manages to make them starkly beautiful even while they are truthfully mundane. His daughter wants artichoke and chocolate in the psych ward. His mentally ill brother drinks Lipton tea out of the same pickle jar for twenty years. Greenberg edits a perfectly good novel into smithereens in an attempt to just do something that doesn't involve intense emotions.

For anyone who has been close to someone with mental health issues, which I imagine, is everyone--this is a really normalizing reading experience. Greenberg doesn't glamorize his daughter's illness, nor does he pretend there is no beauty in it. Somehow he strikes a very honest, very self-revealing chord that reminds me--once again--how much a psychotic break can resemble the truth, however scary the mania.

Case in point: his daughter, Sally, believes that:

Everyone is born a genius, but it is drummed out of us almost from the minute we open our eyes. Everyone possesses this genius. It's our unmentionable secret. When childhood is over we are afraid to salvage it from without ourselves, because it would be too risky to do so, it would rupture our drone's pact with society, it would threaten our ability to survive.

This is what leads to her break with reality. Doesn't sound half crazy.