That Old Depression ...

Nicholas Hughes’s mother, and mine, succumbed to the exhaustion of unrelenting depression. They self-destructed. And we grew up in the wreckage of their catastrophe. Their deaths took away from him and his sister, Frieda, and from me and my sister, Joyce, the solace of a mother’s love. And worse, all four of us, I imagine, had to live with the knowledge that our mothers had quite willfully abandoned us.

Following the suicide of poet Sylvia Plath's son, Nicholas, Linda Grey Sexton shares her own experience of living with a tortured inheritance the The New York Times. Her mother, Anne Sexton (left) killed herself in 1974.

Staying, for the moment, on the depressing topic of depression (!), novelist Margaret Drabble writes very candidly in The Guardian about how she wards off her own bouts :

I write at least in part to investigate, to ward off, to understand these recurrent dark periods. Maybe depression fulfils a useful function, maybe it has an evolutionary benefit. In the year of Darwin, this is a question that I haven't yet seen posed. How early in pre-history, how many millennia before Hamlet, did man and woman begin to suffer in the mind as well as in the body, and what good did it do the human race?... Many other writers have prophylactic motivations similar to mine, and some admit to them, though others strongly deny any connection between writing and self-therapy, just as they tend to deny links between alcoholism and workaholism.

Drabble reads from her new autobiography The Pattern in the Carpet here.

David Foster Wallace Dies

Heard the sad new from Preeta that American author David Foster Wallace took his own life on Friday evening at the age of 46. As Preeta says :

... it's a tremendous loss ... was a genius according to most definitions of the word: a true innovator, a challenger of convention, someone who changed his art form as much as he contributed to it. The art of the novel hasn't been the same since Infinite Jest and his influence is apparent in the work of so many who've followed ...

Timothy Williams writes the New York Times obituary and Michiko Kautani appraises his work.

Postscript :

Obituary by Michael Carlson in the Guardian and a heartfelt blog post by Robert Potts.

Guy Adams in the Independent explores the author's dark side.

Charlie Rose interviews him here.

Harpers provides links to a whole lot of his writing.

Obituary for Egolf

I'd never heard of the young writer Tristan Egolf till I read his obituary online today. He certainly seemed to have everything to live for. A writing career that had taken off: he had two highly acclaimed novels under his belt (his writing had been compared to Faulkner and Hemingway) and a third completed. A fiance and a baby daughter.

But Egolf shot himself, aged 33.

The story behind the publication of his first novel Lord of the Barnyard (described by Publishers Weekly as "a wild ride of a book") is almost the stuff of novels in itself. According to a report in the LA Times:

After 76 publishers had rejected the novel, Egolf was playing guitar for money on a bridge in Paris when a young woman noticed his cold, sockless feet and invited him for coffee. Her father happened to be a prize-winning author, Patrick Modiano, who took Egolf's book to his French publishing house, which agreed to publish it.

"You hate to think so, but suicide helps to sell books," Walker Percy once said, and I'm sure it's going to happen in this case too.

Would we ever have heard of John Kennedy Toole's The Confederacy of Dunces if the poor man hadn't gassed himself?

But what a sheer bloody waste! Who knows what even greater works these writers might have produced further down the line.

I found this essay on the subject very interesting. Earnest contends that "... we are but sadistic voyeurs who transform a writer's pain into a reader's pleasure." Perhaps true.

Some lost souls who did not handle life's difficulties well enough.