Matt Haig | Jaya's blog

Reading for pleasure!

Dispersal time in school is always a very noisy and crowded affair. Adults milling about waiting to pick up their little children who are released from their classrooms in batches. Always I stand amongst the crowd with a book in my hand, reading peacefully. Yet there will be at least one person who while passing by will remark on how I am always seen with a book in my hand. Or there will be others who will throw sideway glances at my reading a book whereas will not be perturbed at all by others looking into their smartphone screens! Reading is meditative. Depending on my mood I can read reams and reams or go extremely slowly through a book, savouring every page. Having said that in recent days I have managed to read a few books. An eclectic but satisfying collection.

To begin with is the utterly delightful The Unexpected Truth About Animals:A Menagerie of the Misunderstood by zoologist Lucy Cooke. In it she devotes a chapter each to a motley collection of animals such as eels, sloths ( Lucy is also the founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society), pandas, chimpanzees, hippopotamus, vultures and bats to name a few. She packs in plenty of history beginning from when the animals were first discovered, much of the information and sometimes myths about these creatures that became fashionable were propounded in the Victorian era, and are later dispelled with as recently as in the late twentieth, early twenty-first century. It is like reading an Attenborough series on natural history but with a lot more razzmatazz and spunk. It is a laugh-out-aloud book with full of incredibly fascinating but silly facts. Did you know that female sloths yodel for a mate only in D-sharp? Did you know that a group of chimpanzees can be located deep inside a forest by the amount of noise their flatulence makes? Did you know that Sigmund Freud’s first published paper was on eels? It was called “Observations on the Form and Fine Structure of Looped Organs of the Eel, Organs Considered as Testes”. It is a book that can even be used as bedtime reading to children in judicious doses. Lucy Cooke writes extremely well. Yet it is so packed with information that it can only be read in morsels and not at one go. A precious book indeed!

Sticking with the theme of nature is the deliciously soothing memoir of milennial Helen Jukes who had a dull day job called A Honeybee Heart Has Five Opening. It was stifling but it could not be wished away. To give herself some peaceful me-time Helen Jukes decided to become an urban beekeeper. She reads up extensively about it and meets other beekeepers too. Her friends realising how determined Helen is to be a beekeeper gift her a beehive for Christmas, to be collected in Spring. It fits perfectly with the popular belief that for a hive to flourish ideally it should be gifted and not purchased by the intended owner. The enforced self-reflection maintenance of a beehive imposes upon Helen also helps her cope with the everchanging world around her. It helps her come to terms with her rootlessness and build a community around her, much like her little charges. It is an incredibly amazing memoir, which Helen MacDonald, bestselling author of H is for Hawk rightly calls “Strange, beautiful and unexpected. I loved it.” Even Alex Preston who reviewed the book for the Guardian has praised it saying “moved and delighted me more than a book about insects had any right to”. Speaking of memoirs, Alex Preston’s astonishing memoir As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Birds & Books is a must read as well. It has been exquisitely illustrated by Neil Gower with full page paintings of the birds. While reading the memoir it will encourage the reader to take up birdwatching as well as prompt the reader to scurry to make a marvellous reading list as well. I read it many moons ago but it has still not left me.

The incredible centring reading these books gives is much like the peace bestselling Matt Haig advises on getting in Notes on a Nervous Planet. He speaks so much good sense but marshalled together in this manner it never gets dull. What is particularly spectacular is his psychogram chart. An imaginary unit of measure he introduces “to measure psychological weight as we each feel it”. He does underline the fact that psychological weight fluctuates greatly. Psychograms are a subjective measure. Nevertheless here are some examples:

Walking through the shopping centre 1,298 pg

Looking at images of perfect bodies you’ll never have 488pg

Guilt from not going to the gym 50 pg

Arguing with an online troll 632 pg

Having your job replaced by a robot 2,156 pg

The things you wish you haven’t done but wish you had 1,293 pg

The book is exactly as the title describes it — notes on a nervous planet. Matt Haig’s argument being basically everyone seems to be rushed for time, wanting to juggle multiple tasks and responsibilities, clean forgetting that we only have one life and limited time. Matt Haig knows what he is talking about having been on the brink of suicide and suffering from acute depression. He has pulled himself together again and still has his low days but it does not prevent him from share wise advice and enjoying each day as it comes. So he also devised a list of minus psychograms. Here are a few fabulous examples:

The sun appearing unexpectedly from behin a cloud 57 -pg

Being on holiday somewhere with no wi-fi (after the initial panic) 638 -pg

Being lost in a good book 732 -pg

Being surrounded by nature 1,291 -pg

A close relative recovering from an operation 3,982 -pg

And so on.

Matt Haig is someone worth following on Twitter and reading everything he publishes. He writes sensitively without preaching; he is empathetic and imparts immense wisdom. Apart from self-help books such as Notes on a Nervous Planet he has also published novels and utterly gorgeous christmas stories for children. Truly a talented man!

I also managed to read a pile of Australian literature in recent days and loved it. Beginning with the fictional biography of Birdman’s Wife by Melissa Ashley which is about the artist Elizabeth Gould whose husband was the famous John Gould. She assisted her husband in drawing many of his specimens and inevitably in pencilled his name next to her initials on the drawings. She died in 1841 at the age of thirty-seven, soon after giving birth to her eighth child, but by then she had also completed more than 650 hand-coloured lithographs of the world’s most beautiful bird species. She also illustrated Charles Darwin’s Galapagos finches. She was also a friend of Edward Lear. In the book John Gould is heard saying “I have a bird-sketcher of my very own. Trained, talented. And she costs nothing at all.” The Birdman’s Wife is a fictional account of Elizabeth Gould but it was triggered off by the discovery of a few pages of her diary tucked between her husband’s well preserved letterbook, a book of correspondence. It is a slow paced while rich with details portrait of a woman who wanted to serve her husband well but at the same time comes across as lonely and overworked. The Birdman’s Wife written by a birder and academic Melissa Ashley so there are many splendid descriptions of birds sometimes taking away from the main story but after a point it matters little since at least Elizabeth Gould is finally recognised for her work.

Some of the other stupendous Australian books I read were:

a meditative novel inspired by Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present called The Museum of Modern Love. It is by Heather Rose and won the Stella Prize 2017
a stunning collection of short stories by Fiona McFarlane The High Places. It won the Dylan Thomas Prize 2017.
Storyland by Catherine McKinnon extraordinary novel that spans centuries narrating the history of the Australian continent. The manner in which the novel has been written too is fascinating with the chapter breaks leading to a different era. It is somewhat like a gaming book where you can choose how to read the book but whichever option you select will always present a lucid narrative. Extraordinary!
Tour de Oz is the true story of cyclist Arthur Richardson and two brothers Frank and Alex White who chose to ‘circumcycle’ Australia in 1899. Four years before the launch of Tour de France! Arthur cycled in one direction and the two brothers in a counter-clockwise direction. While narrating the events itself sports journalist and author Bret Harris also uses it as a reason to describe the continent of pre-Federation Australia.

All in all, a satisfying few days reading a pile of interesting literature.

To buy:

The Unexpected Truth About Animals:A Menagerie of the Misunderstood

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Opening

As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Birds & Books

Notes on a Nervous Planet

The High Places

20 September 2018

Book Post 7: 19 – 25 August 2018

31 08 , 2018 No Comments

Every Monday I post some of the books I have received in the previous week. Embedded in the book covers and post will also be links to buy the books on Amazon India. This post will be in addition to my regular blog posts and newsletter.

In today’s Book Post 7 I have included some titles that I received in the past few weeks and are worth mentioning and not necessarily confined to parcels received last week.

Enjoy reading!

27 August 2018

Sarah Moon’s “Sparrow”

21 06 , 2018 No Comments

And then there it is, our new, terrible silent routine. And to top it off, I have no birds and the world feels like a different kind of dark than it felt before. Mom isn’t perfect, but I miss her. I miss her picky neatness, I miss her bothering me about taking my nose out of a book and making a friend for once, I miss her getting on my case about my hair. I miss telling her about what I’m reading, what I’m thinking, asking her about work, listening to her carry on about Aunt Joan and whatever drama she’s gotten into. I miss her. There is a sadness I can’t shake, that’s not just from breakfast. There are no birds by the feeder. There aren’t pigeons cluttering the sidewalk as I go to school. I know, now, that last night’s dream was the last flight I’ll take.

Sarah Moon‘s debut novel for young adults Sparrow is about a teenager of the same name who has a nervous breakdown. Sparrow is fourteen. She was whisked away to hospital from school after being discovered on the roof. Sparrow maintains she was bird watching as she has always been fascinated them fly. Sparrow lives with her mother, who is a single parent. Sparrow is named after the bird by her mother because she was “so small and brown, almost breakable, but so strong. Tiny but mighty…”. Few weeks later Sparrow is released in her mother’s care with the stipulation she takes her prescribed medication and visits a therapist regularly. So it is fixed that Sparrow attends regular sessions with Dr. Katz which are protected by doctor-patient confidentiality and even Sparrow’s mother cannot sit in upon the hour-long meetings. At first Sparrow refuses to speak to Dr. Katz but after weeks of therapy Sparrow begins to come around. It is probably listening to Dr. Katz playlist which begins to break the barriers for Sparrow. So much so she orders the very same songs/bands she heard during therapy for her listening pleasure at home. All through months of treatment and close questioning by her mother Sparrow is adamant that she was not trying to kill herself but just wanted to be with the birds. Probable reason for her being found alone on the roof ledge was she was devastated upon hearing of the tragic death of her favourite librarian, Mrs Wexler, in a traffic accident. Mrs. Wexler had been warm and welcoming to the shy and reserved Sparrow, encouraging the little girl to sit in the library any time she felt like it, read, participate in the book club etc. Mrs. Wexler offered the fragile little Sparrow a refuge from a world which constantly overwhelmed her.

Sparrow begins from the moment Sparrow is released from the hospital. She is portrayed as a very lonely girl who slowly opens out under Dr Katz’s patient guidance. By the end of the novel Sparrow finds the smallest steps like conversing with other girls of her age still a daunting task but at least she is doing it! It suddenly dawns upon her during the finale when she is running away from her responsibility that the feeling of being ready will never come. She has to muster courage. “I am not going to be ready. I’m going to have to do this without being ready.” The ultimate epiphany is that the very same music that helped her in therapy is where she finally gets what she has been craving for — to fly away, for her limbs to go light. In fact Sarah Moon created her playlist for Sparrow on Spotify. In it are listed all the pieces of music referenced in the story.

Depression comes in many shades. With the recent suicides of two prominent people Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain within a week of each other has suddenly put the spotlight on mental health. These issues were always there and always discussed but the magnitude of this problem is unthinkable. To quote Dr Anirudh Kala, Clinical Director, Mind Plus:

Clinical depression is the commonest mental illness and it is true that life time prevalence of depression(which means how many people at one time or the other during their life time will suffer from it) is about 18-20% and many times it just comes out of the blue without any stress like any medical illness which Clinical Depression actually is a medical illness. Both drugs and psychological treatment methods help and these help the best when used together.

However many well meaning but ill informed persons and some pop psychologists keep telling the person that the key to getting matter is to feel positive implying that the patient can if he willed to feel positive and get better, which is not true. You cannot will away your depression like you cannot will away your fever or your thyroid problem. And it makes the person worse because because he is told he can and he cant’. That is why the quip,’ Positivity is a scam.’

( In fact Dr Kala is also a debut author with his forthcoming collection of short stories The Unsafe Asylum: Stories of Partition and Madness)

In Longreads essay “Surviving Depression” by Danielle Tcholakian written after the deaths of the Bourdain and Spade one of the sanest pieces of advice shared for those who battle depression every day as well as those around them is:

…the biggest lesson I’ve learned in wrestling with this illness for nearly 20 years. You can’t get out of it alone. It is also, confusingly, true that no one can save you — you’re always the one who has to do the work, who has to slog through the muddy darkness — but the eminently human kindnesses of friends and family along the way are what make the slog even remotely possible. And the truth is, you don’t have to do much of anything most of the time. Just be there. . . . Depression is a beast that swallows you whole and forces you to live inside it until you fight your way out — always with help, always with the others safely outside the beast who can pull you back.

Writing about a teenager whose mental health is being questioned by everyone around her even though the teenager herself is under the impression that her reality makes perfect sense is probably not easy. Yet Sarah Moon’s undeniable wizardry is evident in her sensitive storytelling. Sparrow can be challenging even for an experienced author to create as it is a potential minefield if not handled well. It can fall apart easily. After Nathan Filer’s The Shock of Fall this is another great young adult novel to add to a school reading list. Perhaps to be read in conjunction with Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive which is not a young adult novel, nevertheless an excellent memoir about coming-to-terms with depression and easily accessible to readers of all ages.

Do read Sparrow. It is not always easy to read for it can be a challenge to read but it is time well spent.

Sarah Moon Sparrow Arthur A. Levine Books, An imprint of Scholastic Inc., New York, 2017. Hb. pp. 270

21 June 2018

Jordan B. Peterson “12 Rules for Life”

21 03 , 2018 No Comments

[bwwpp_book sku=’97803458160230000000′]

Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos lays down rules for a better living in a noisy modern world. There is an authoritarian tone to the rules as listed in the table of contents. The arguments laid out in the book stem from his online discussions on the popular platform Quora.

Every chapter is preceded by an alarmingly disturbing ink illustration involving children. “Alarming” because every single image rather than being hopeful and a cofidence building measure inevitably has a tone which hints that it is best where you are, do not try and have dreams. Take for instance Rule 3 which states “Make friends wtih people who want the best for you” is accompanied by an illustration of the statue of David by Michelangelo with a very tiny figure of a child looking up at this enormous statue. It looks positively monstrous in the illustration. It is a matter of perspective possibly but to have such distressing illustrations will serve the sole purpose of terrifying people, forcing them to remain where they are and to accept institutional systems and their social conditions as is, instead of questioning or being ambitious and hopeful. These forms of intellectual arguments are detrimental to the growth of an individual and for society at large but most people will know no better for undoubtedly Jordan Peterson is fairly persuasive in his arguments.

Pankaj Mishra in a justifiably scathing attack of Jordan Peterson’s book in the NYRB ( Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism, 19 March 2018) has this to say:

In all respects, Peterson’s ancient wisdom is unmistakably modern. The “tradition” he promotes stretches no further back than the late nineteenth century, when there first emerged a sinister correlation between intellectual exhortations to toughen up and strongmen politics. This was a period during which intellectual quacks flourished by hawking creeds of redemption and purification while political and economic crises deepened and faith in democracy and capitalism faltered. Many artists and thinkers—ranging from the German philosopher Ludwig Klages, member of the hugely influential Munich Cosmic Circle, to the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich and Indian activist Aurobindo Ghosh—assembled Peterson-style collages of part-occultist, part-psychological, and part-biological notions. These neo-romantics were responding, in the same way as Peterson, to an urgent need, springing from a traumatic experience of social and economic modernity, to believe—in whatever reassures and comforts.

….

The “desperation of meaninglessness” widely felt in the late nineteenth century, seemed especially desperate in the years following two world wars and the Holocaust. Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, all credentialed by university education, met a general bewilderment by suggesting the existence of a secret, almost gnostic, knowledge of the world. Claiming to throw light into recessed places in the human unconscious, they acquired immense and fanatically loyal fan clubs. Campbell’s 1988 television interviews with Bill Moyers provoked a particularly extraordinary response. As with Peterson, this popularizer of archaic myths, who believed that “Marxist philosophy had overtaken the university in America,” was remarkably in tune with contemporary prejudices. “Follow your own bliss,” he urged an audience that, during an era of neoconservative upsurge, was ready to be reassured that some profound ancient wisdom lay behind Ayn Rand’s paeans to unfettered individualism.

Peterson, however, seems to have modelled his public persona on Jung rather than Campbell.

…

Peterson may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage. But it is worth remembering that Jung recklessly generalized about the superior “Aryan soul” and the inferior “Jewish psyche” and was initially sympathetic to the Nazis. Mircea Eliade was a devotee of Romania’s fascistic Iron Guard. Campbell’s loathing of “Marxist” academics at his college concealed a virulent loathing of Jews and blacks. Solzhenitsyn, Peterson’s revered mentor, was a zealous Russian expansionist, who denounced Ukraine’s independence and hailedVladimir Putin as the right man to lead Russia’s overdue regeneration.

Meanwhile the book continues to sell and has climbed the bestseller charts worldwide although it never made it to the New York Times Bestseller list. So much so that Jordan Peterson was moved sufficiently to write a “Thank you note to booksellers” commending them for their good work. In the letter circulated he lists the 12 books which influenced his 12 rules. These are:

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL by Friedrich Nietzsche
MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING by Viktor Frankl
MODERN MAN IN SEARCH OF A SOUL by Carl Jung
THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE by Mircea Eliade
THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER by George Orwell
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST by Tom Wolfe
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoevsky
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Fyodor Dostoevsky
ORDINARY MEN by Christopher Browning
THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte

The fact is that Jordan Peterson like conservative intellectuals who through their tub thumping articles persuade individuals to focus on themselves increasingly and not necessarily look at the world in a broader context do far more damage to society. Writing such “self-help” books that explicitly encourage an individual to narrow their landscapes considerably to the microcosm create more havoc than be an “antidote to chaos”. An illustrative example is that he offers of a rape survivor to illustrate his Rule 9 “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t” is a a very messed up argument. There are pages and pages of his analysis and reporting his conversation with the victim but this particular passage stands out for its misogyny.

She talked a lot. When we were finished, she still didn’t know if she had been raped and neither did I. Life is very complicated.

Sometimes you have to change the way you understand everything to properly understand a single something. “Was I raped?” can be a very complicated question. The mere fact that the question would present itself in that form indicates the existence of infinite layers of complexity — to say nothing of “five times.” There are a myriad of questions hidden inside “Was I raped?: What is rape? What is consent? What constitutes appropriate sexual caution? How should a person defend herself? Where does the fault lie? “Was I raped?” is a hydra. If you cut off the head of a hydra, seven more grow. That’s life. Miss S would have had to talk for twenty years to figure out whether she had been raped.

As Pankaj Mishra points out:

Nowhere in his published writings does Peterson reckon with the moral fiascos of his gurus and their political ramifications; he seems unbothered by the fact that thinking of human relations in such terms as dominance and hierarchy connects too easily with such nascent viciousness such as misogyny, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. He might argue that his maps of meaning aim at helping lost individuals rather than racists, ultra-nationalists, or imperialists. But he can’t plausibly claim, given his oft-expressed hostility to the “murderous equity doctrine” of feminists, and other progressive ideas, that he is above the fray of our ideological and culture wars.

Writer Matt Haig in a different context had this to say on Twitter about feminism and patriarchal mindsets. It is applicable in the context of this book:

Feminism isn't hurting men's mental health. Patriarchal ideas of the impossible strong, silent, successful male are. We need to broaden the emotional range. We need to be seen as carers, as talkers, as vulnerable, as in need of other people. Everyone wins.

— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) March 19, 2018

Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life is a book that will be discussed for years to come. Read it if you must while bearing in mind the larger picture of intellectual discourse.

Jordan Peterson 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, London, 2018. Pb. pp.410 Rs 699

21 March 2018

Jaya’s newsletter 5 ( 1 Dec 2016)

01 12 , 2016 No Comments

Since the last newsletter it has been a whirlwind of book releases, literature festivals and fabulous conversations. For instance a lovely evening spent at the Canadian High Commissioner, H. E. Nadir Patel’s residence for the launch of Indo-Canadian writer, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s essays — Reluctant Rebellions. Shauna read out an extract comparing the freedom women had in different geographies. She added that writing non-fiction was akin to being naked. There is no literary device as there is in fiction to hide the author’s true sentiments. Dr Shashi Tharoor spoke at the event too.

To attend the Tata Literature Live! Festival in Mumbai was award winning Australian author, Geoffrey Moorhouse. He is known for his historical fiction such as on the League of Nations. During a quiet lunch at the Australian High Commission, New Delhi, it was incredible to hear Moorhouse describe the research involved for the books. He had thought it would take a few weeks but he spent nearly four years in the Geneva archives. Mostly he was the only person reading the documents.

On 17 September 2016, H.E. Syed Muazzem Ali, High Commissioner, Bangladesh released the gently told but vivid memoir of haemotologist-oncologist Dr Fazlur Rahman. It charts mostly the journey of the doctor from a village to Texas in 1969 with some insights into his experience as an oncologist, caregiver and in setting up hospices. But as the high commissioner pointed out it is in exactly such literature that the history of the subcontinent will be mapped and preserved. During the panel discussion Dr Rahman stressed the importance of empathy for the patient and caregiver and the significance of medical, physical and spiritual sustenance.

The Times Lit Fest (26-27 Nov 2016) was a tremendous success. It was a crackling good mix of speakers and the panel discussions were well curated. Everything ran with clockwork precision even though there were tremendous crowds to be seen everywhere. To discuss her elegant new novel, Things to leave Behind, I was in conversation with Namita Gokhale, writer and co-director of Jaipur Literature Festival. This multi-generations novel is set in the Himalayas, in the Nainital and Sat Tal region, putting the spotlight on socio-economic relationships, independence of women, spread of religious philosophies and the rigid caste system.

As the year draws to a close some significant literary prizes / longlists have been announced.

Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize was won by Akshaya Mukul for Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India
Tata Literature Live! Awards were presented with Amitav Ghosh getting the Lifetime Achievement Award and Kanishk Tharoor winning for his stupendous debut collection of stories.
The International Dublin Literary Award ( formerly the IMPAC) longlist was announced and it included two Indian writers on it — Keki Daruwala and Vivek Shanbhag.
The 14th Raymond Crossword Book Awards had an impressive list of winners. Sadly this time there were no
(L-R): Twinkle Khanna, Roopa Pai and Ranjit Lal

cash prizes awarded instead gift vouchers were given to the winning authors.

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Jaya Recommends

Matt Haig’s incredibly beautiful must-have modern fairy tales A Boy Called Christmas and The Girl Who Saved Christmas ( Canongate Books)
Namita Gokhale’s Things to Leave Behind ( Penguin Random House)
Ranjit Lal’s Our Nana was a Nutcase ( Red Turtle)
Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari Conversations ( 1 & 2) , Seagull Books

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New Arrivals

Being a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz ( Simon and Schuster)
Amba by Laksmi Pamuntjak ( Speaking Tiger Books)
Uttara: The Book of Answers translated by Arshia Sattar ( Penguin Random House)
Bestselling author Stephanie Meyer’s new book is a thriller called The Chemist ( Hachette India)
White Mountain: Real and Imagined Journeys in the Himalayas by Robert Twigger ( Hachette India)

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Publishing News and links

Nineteen years after working at PRH India, Udayan Mitra, Publisher, has quit.
The two week long Dum Pukht residential workshop with facilitators Anil Menon, Pervin Saket, Akshat Nigam and special guest Amit Chaudhuri premieres at Adishakti, Pondicherry this Monday, 5 Dec 2016. The workshop also features one-day talks / sessions by poet Arundhati Subramaniam and historian Senthil Babu.
Utterly fabulous BBC Documentary on UK-based feminist publishing house, Virago Press
Neil Gaiman on “How Stories Last“
Two centuries of Indian print. A British Library project that will digitise 1,000 unique Bengali printed books and 3,000 early printed books and enhance the catalogue records to automate searching and aid discovery by researchers.
Two stupendous reviews of Shashi Tharoor’s latest book, An Era Of Darkness. The first one is by historian Indivar Kamtekar and the second by journalist Salil Tripathi.
A lovely review by Nisha Susan of Twinkle Khanna’s short stories — The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad.
Gopsons prints Booker winner, yet again
Best of 2016 booklists: Guardian ( 1 & 2) , New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2016 and Publishers Weekly

1 December 2016

Literature on mental health

30 08 , 2016 No Comments

This past month I have spent a while reading literature about mental health. It was sparked off by the publication of the maginificent collection of essays edited by award-winning author, Jerry Pinto. A Book of Light: When a Loved One has a Different Mind consists of essays written by caregivers to mentally-challenged patients. These could be daughter, mother, son, father or even a close friend. All the essays are written by a caregiver who is also part of the immediate family so has witnessed the painful deterioration of the loved one. Some of the essays like Nirpuma Dutt on her adopted daughter though written using the literary device of an omniscient narrator is one of the most chilling and moving contributions. Every single essay stands out for the grief caused but also for the time and effort required in the caregiving which was mostly offered uncomplaingly and with total dedication. Amandeep Sandhu’s essay about his mother which I first read in draft many years ago continues to be powerful once published years later. As if this caregiving was meant to be. This was the truth. Jerry Pinto who won the Windham-Campbell prize in 2016 has been writing for years made his mark as a literary fiction writer with the splendid novel, Em and Hoom. A thinly disguised fictional account about his mother who remained in poor mental health for most of her life. It was twenty-six years in the making. Despite the vast variety of literature across genres and now his forays into translations, Jerry Pinto is at his best when writing about mental afflictions. There is a certain tenderness and sensitive understanding that seeps through his essays as it does in the introduction to this book and his curation of the essays.

Having read this splendid volume in one sitting I found some more books to read. For instance, Matt Haig’s powerful autobiography Reasons to Stay Alive. It is about his leading a perfectly normal life except to develop acute depression and have a nervous breakdown in his early twenties. He even attempted suicide but then slowly recovered with the help of his then-girlfriend and now wife, Andrea, and his parents. Today, he is a successful author for children and adults and is a social media influencer ( @matthaig1) .

When you are trapped inside something that feels so unreal, you look for anything that gives you a sense of your bearings. I craved knowledge. I craved facts. I searched for them like lifebuoys in the sea. …Things that occur in the mind can often be hidden. Indeed when I first became ill I spent a lot of energy on looking normal. People often only know someone is suffering if they tell them, and with depression that doesn’t always happen, especially if you are male ( more on that later).

Then I discovered bestselling author Jenny Lawson’s Furiously Happy that explores her lifelong battle with mental illness. It is written at a pitch that can get disconcertingly high, it is not easy trying to keep pace with the ups and lows in her life which are surpringly palpable in the text as well. But what truly shines through is the struggle of managing daily life and yet how determined she is. Simple things are daunting but the unimaginable fear she experienced when recording her audiobook turned her into a nervous wreck. So she finally turned to her friend, Neil Gaiman, for advice and this is what he texted her: “Pretend you’re good at it.” She took his advice to heart and shone.

Reasons to Stay Alive and Furiously Happy are two books written from the perspective of people who struggle with mental ill-health but have had the courage to write about it too. Offer an opinion that does not consider them over sensitive, peculiar and odd.

And then I read Oliver Sacks absolutely stupendous memoir On the Move. It was first published in April 2015 a few weeks before he succumbed to cancer on 30 August 2015, exactly a year ago today. In fine literary form it reflects upon a richly memorable life that spans eight decades focusing on his fascination with neurology, science, music, literature and his strong links with his family. Oliver Sacks came from a family of doctors where even his mother was a renowned surgeon. His father and two elder brothers were general practitioners but Oliver Sacks decided to become a neurologist. What is extraordinary is his recognition that when he began medical school in the mid-1950s there seemed to be an unbridgeable gap between neurophysiology and the actualities of how patients experienced neurological disorders. Neurology continued to follow the clinico-anatomical method set by Broca a century earlier, locating areas of damage in the brain and correlating these with symptoms; thus speech disturbances were correlated with damage to Broca’s speech area, paralysis with damage to motor areas, and so on. But by the mid-1980s scientists like Gerald M. Edelman were stating boldly that “We are at the beginning of the neuroscience revolution.” Having witnessed, documented and analysed significant neurological milestones writing about them in medical journals and popular magazines made him famous. It probably also helped recognise to some degree that mental ailments need to be discussed. Mentally ill patients are not pariah. Having firsthand experience of looking after a schizophrenic brother and extremely fond of a simple-minded aunt, a treasured member of their household he had a warm and sensitive generosity evident in the way he dealt with his patients too. More importantly he had a sense of history and an understanding to document what he experienced and analyse it. A rich and influential legacy he left on the way mentally-ill patients are perceived and how they can also learn to manage themselves. But at least he with his passion for neurological science made it possible for mental health to be made visible in public discourse. Otherwise how else would a well-known scientist and Pulitzer-award winner Siddhartha Mukherjee begin his fascinating account of the gene with a very personal account of his schizophrenic uncle?

Jerry Pinto ( Ed.) A Book of Light: When a Loved One Has a Different Mind Speaking Tiger, Delhi, 2016. Hb. Pp.180. Rs. 399

Matt Haig Reasons to Stay Alive Canongate, London, 2016. Pb. Pp. 270 Rs 499

Jenny Lawson Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, London, 2016. Pb. Pp. 330 Rs 450

Oliver Sacks On the Move: A Life Picador, London, 2015. Pb. Pp. Rs 499

30 August 2016

Matt Haig Posts

Reading for pleasure!

Book Post 7: 19 – 25 August 2018

Sarah Moon’s “Sparrow”

Jordan B. Peterson “12 Rules for Life”

Jaya’s newsletter 5 ( 1 Dec 2016)

Literature on mental health

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