| Book | Problem Faced | Rock Bottom | Epiphany |
|---|---|---|---|
| Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction by Susan Cheever. Simon & Schuster. October 7. | On top of her fully fledged alcoholism, Cheever diagnoses herself as addicted to sex partners. | Sleeping with mother’s oncologist and forgetting to pick up 6-year-old daughter as the result of a tryst. Letting basset hound Bentley eat the wedding cake at her third wedding. | Realizing that she can choose not to sleep with the sexy architect who woos her mid-interview. |
| Scattershot: My Bipolar Family by David Lovelace. Dutton. September 4. | David Lovelace confronts his bipolar disorder, while trying to help his father, mother, and brother, who all have forms of manic depression or schizophrenia. | On (manic) father’s instruction, Lovelace poisons mother by giving her too much lithium. | Discovering his kids aren’t doomed to share his family’s problems. |
| Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg. Other Press. September 9. | A Greenwich Village “hack” journalist reels when his 15-year-old daughter, Sally, has a sudden, violent crack-up. | Greenberg swallows a full dose of Sally’s medication in the attempt to “see the world as she does”; in a stupor, he stabs himself with a fork. | His wife, Pat, turns the trauma of Sally’s time in the psych ward into a modern-dance piece called Clinical Data. Greenberg fears that it is “too intense,” but Sally finds it mesmerizing and healing. |
Alcoholic Unanonymous!
This summer, David Carr proved the troubled-times memoir was alive and kicking. Now here come three more books tackling addiction or mental illness.
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