Description
Book SynopsisAt the age of twenty-seven, married, living in New York, and working in book design, Mary Cregan gives birth to her first child, a daughter she names Anna. But it's apparent that something is terribly wrong and two days later, Anna dies, plunging Cregan into suicidal despair. Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on and attempts to make sense of this pivotal experience. Weaving together literature and research with details from her long-buried medical records, she writes of her own ordeal and the still-visible scar of a suicide attempt- while considering it as part of a larger history of our understanding of depression. She investigates the treatments she underwent, from hospitalization and shock therapy to psychotherapy and antidepressants. At once intimate and scholarly, The Scar illuminates a too often stigmatised affliction with compassion and intelligence and offers hope to all those who are still struggling.
Trade Review‘The book will be passed from person to person, within families, from doctor to doctor. It will really help people ... What makes the book stand out is the sheer clarity of the writing, the personal fragility and the wrestling with demons emerging here with a kind of grace, a hardwon heroism.’ —COLM TÓIBÍN ‘The Scar is a memoir unique in my experience: intensely personal, warmly and unflinchingly intimate, yet wide-ranging, informative, even scholarly – beautifully and persuasively written. Unlike any other memoir I have read touching on psychological vulnerability and the risk of suicide, The Scar reaches beyond its immediate subject to provide a cultural and historical context for that most mysterious of afflictions, “depression” ... making it particularly valuable at the present time.’ —JOYCE CAROL OATES ‘What makes this immensely helpful and beautifully written book so moving is the way the author keeps unpeeling one layer after another of her experience, with such exquisite patience and intelligence that it is impossible not to care or identify with her’ –PHILLIP LOPATE
A searingly honest and riveting book … This is a book that will really matter to anyone who has been through the experiences of depression. What makes the book stand out is the sheer clarity of the writing, the personal fragility and the wrestling with demons emerging here with a kind of grace, a hard-won heroism. * Colm Toibin *
[Sufferers of mental illness] can tell us about it in raw narrative form. But they cannot be trusted to interpret it through research and scholarship and all the disciplines that require a cool and methodical objectivity. And this of course is deeply wrong. For many, many travellers do indeed return from the country of the deranged mind. If, like the Irish-American writer and academic Mary Cregan, they are scholars and thinkers, they return to those very disciplines. Yet how are they to write? Subjectively within the frame of memoir – this is what happened to me? Or objectively within the frame of academic expertise – this is what my experience means when seen through the lens of history, literature and culture? It is very difficult, and indeed quite subversive, to do both at the same time and it is Cregan’s ability to manage it that makes The Scar so remarkable and so important. -- Fintan O'Toole * The Irish Times *
Cregan writes lucidly of her illness and offers hope as well as valuable insights for those living with depression. * Publishers Weekly *
In providing kinship to its fellow traveler, The Scar becomes the best sort of memoir — one that serves a higher purpose. -- Leslie Kendall Dye * Los Angeles Review of Books *
