 |
|
 |
This author appeared at the 2009 festival. Please view the list of authors appearing at this year's festival or see our suggestions for similar authors below.
 Michael Greenberg
On July 5th, 1996 Michael Greenberg's daughter was ushered home by the police because, as Greenberg soon found out, she was "struck mad" on a New York City street. Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father's Story of Love and Madness is the story of how he copes with the intense pain and confusion of being incapable of bringing his daughter back to reality. Trapped in a manic loop of poetic yet nonsensical speech, Sally becomes a stranger to him. Often responding in puns, Sally's intelligence permeates even her most delirious outbursts. Greenberg's taut prose offers a glimpse into his daughter's madness as he attempts to piece together why this tragedy occurred; to do so, he traces his way through famous examples of manic depression and its effects on the father-daughter relationship (like James Joyce and his daughter Lucia), his brother's history with mental illness, and the parallels between him and his daughter, like their eerily similar wordplay. Joyce Carol Oates calls Hurry Down Sunshine "touching, warmly intimate, and unsparing." When the book was published, The New York Times Book Review wrote, "What sets Hurry Down Sunshine apart from the great horde of mediocre memoirs with their sitcom emotions … is Greenberg's frank pessimism, dark humor and fundamental incapacity to make sense of his daughter’s ordeal, let alone to derive an uplifting moral from it." Michael Greenberg is a columnist for the Times Literary Supplement (London); his work has also appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Village Voice, and the Boston Review.
|
|
