Daphne Merkin opens This Close to Happy(Farrar, Straus, Giroux), her new memoir about living with depression and its tangled causes and effects, with a suicide fantasy. What would it be like to announce, with finality, that you are done with trying—after trying very hard—to be a person?
"No more rage at the circumstances that have brought you down. No more dread. No more going from day to day in a state of suspended animation, feeling tired around the eyes—behind them, too—and making conversation, hoping no one can tell what's going on inside," Merkin writes. "No more anguish, that roaring pain inside your head feels physical but has no somatic correlation that can be addressed and treated with a Band-Aid or ointment or cast. Most of all, no more disguise, no more need to wear a mask…"
Merkin, who grew up privileged, in a money sense, on Park Avenue, and became a successful New York writer, thinks of suicide often—more as a way to comfort herself than as an actual plan. She has, at times, been deeply suicidal, but she has kept herself from going through with it, almost to her dismay. (I have promised myself suicide the way other people promise themselves a new car, gleaming and spiffy," she writes. "It's something I think I deserve…")
She's now in her 60s, and her new book traces back the ostensible roots of her persistent despair to her Orthodox Jewish childhood under the "fascist regime" (her brother's words) of her wealthy but abusive parents, not from a safe distance, but inside of it. This Close to Happy is neither overtly helpful nor reassuring to any depressed reader hoping to see that It Gets Better.
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