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 naive, but I had swallowed whole the ideology that connects madness to beauty of spirit. In fact, I wasnt interested in being happier, but in growing more poignantly, meaningfully unhappy.Here in her own words is Emily Fox Gordon, therapy veteran, sometime mental patient, and prizewinning essayist. In lyric prose as memorable for its wicked humor as for its penetrating intelligence, she tells the story of her therapeutic education, marked by no fewer than five therapists before she turned seventeen. At eighteen, after a halfhearted suicide attempt, Gordon began a threeyear sojourn at the prestigious Austen Riggs sanitarium. It was at Riggs that Gordon was rescued by the maverick psychoanalyst Leslie Farber, who offered judgment instead of neutrality, friendship instead of silence, and moral instruction through dialogue. Beautifully crafted and startling in its observations of the therapeutic enterprise, Mockingbird Years is a stunning debut by a major new talent.
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55,552 words256 pagesLexile 1240L
Published 20009780465027279
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