“On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad.” So begins Michael Greenberg’s searing, stunningly written, and mesmerizing memoir of the 15th year of his daughter, Sally, and her sudden, inexplicable descent into psychosis.

Michael Greenberg already had enough on his plate, it would seem; he ekes out a marginal existence as a freelance writer, lives cheaply in a friend’s sublet that is falling down around his ears, and has a crazy older brother to take care of, too. His second marriage is new and may be foundering. He and his mother are estranged.

The bright spots? His children. Son, Aaron, in college and doing well. And Sally, a brilliant and beautiful teenager who has overcome learning disabilities and is on the path to success until, one summer weekend, when she has a psychotic breakdown in the middle of a New York street.

Hurry Down Sunshine is a memoir of that breakdown and its aftermath: how it affects the author, his wife, Sally’s biological mother and stepmother, her brother, her paternal grandmother, and even some of the other patients in the hospital where Greenberg is forced to admit her.

But more than anything it is Michael and Sally’s story: a story of a preternaturally close father and daughter with more in common than even they know, and of their falling apart and growing back together despite the pain and alienation of Sally’s illness and Michael’s guilt and grief.

Greenberg is devastated by the changes in Sally: "It is as if the real Sally has been kidnapped, and here in her place is a demon…who has appropriated her body. The ancient superstition of possession! How else to come to grips with this grotesque transformation?"

Later, in talking about James Joyce’s daughter’s madness, Greenberg relates that Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, said that the reason she was mentally ill was because Joyce “had given her no morale.” Greenberg, even as he knows he has been a loving father, has to wonder what his role in Sally’s madness has been.

Article Author: Lisa Solod Warren

Short story writer and essayist Lisa Solod Warren has been published in a wide variety of literary journals, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. She is the editor of Desire: Women Write About Wanting (Seal Press, 2007). She blogs at opensalon.com and redroom.com. …

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