Daphne Merkin

A gifted and audacious writer confronts her lifelong battle with depression and her search for release This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman’s perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction. She recounts the travails of growing up in a large, affluent family where there was a paucity of love and of basics such as food and clothing despite the presence of a chauffeur and a cook. She goes on to recount her early hospitalization for depression in poignant detail, as well as her complex relationship with her mercurial, withholding mother. Along the way Merkin also discusses her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. She eventually marries, has a child, and suffers severe postpartum depression, for which she is again hospitalized. Merkin also discusses her visits to various therapists and psychopharmocologists, which enables her to probe the causes of depression and its various treatments. The book ends in the present, where the writer has learned how to navigate her depression, if not “cure” it, after a third hospitalization in the wake of her mother’s death.

A Reckoning with Depression

This Close to Happy

A harrowing, compulsively readable novel about breaking free of sexual obsession "No one found Howard Rose interesting, that is, but me.” Judith is an ambitious book editor in her late twenties living and working in New York City. Inexperienced with romantic love, she works hard, sees a small group of friends, and visits Dr. Munch, her beloved therapist, on whom she is dependent. Three weeks after her therapist’s death, Judith reluctantly attends a cocktail party. Her life changes the instant she meets Howard Rose, a charismatic and commanding lawyer thirteen years her senior with whom she becomes sexually obsessed. Swept off her feet, everything she does is now about Howard: He calls her at work, instructs her on what to wear to dinner, and takes control of her body and sexuality with complete ownership. Judith becomes dependent on the push-pull of their sexual entanglement and on Howard’s attention and approval, convinced she’s found the man of her dreams. Until, that is, she understands he’s the man of her nightmares: hostile, reckless, and manipulative, he seems intent on obliterating any sense of self and autonomy that Judith possesses. Escaping Howard’s grasp—and her own perverse enjoyment of being under his control—becomes her mission. Narrated by a Howard-free Judith years later, Daphne Merkin’s 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love charts the persistent hold our pasts have on us. Stylistically varied and punctuated by provocative ruminations on love, family, sex, gender, and relationships, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love is a psychologically voracious descent into sexual obsession, the story of the hazardous extent to which one woman will go to achieve erotic bliss, and of her resolve to reclaim her agency.

A Novel

22 Minutes of Unconditional Love

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights

On Sadness, Writing, the Promise of Fame, and Other Imperfections

Fame Lunches

Enchantment

A un passo dalla felicità. Una resa dei conti con la depressione

A wide-ranging collection of essays by one of America's most perceptive critics of popular and literary culture From one of America's most insightful and independent-minded critics comes a remarkable new collection of essays, her first in more than fifteen years. Daphne Merkin brings her signature combination of wit, candor, and penetrating intelligence to a wide array of subjects that touch on every aspect of contemporary culture, from the high calling of the literary life to the poignant underside of celebrity to our collective fixation on fame. "Sometimes it seems to me that the private life no longer suffices for many of us," she writes, "that if we are not observed by others doing glamorous things, we might as well not exist." Merkin's elegant, widely admired profiles go beneath the glossy façades of neon-lit personalities to consider their vulnerabilities and demons, as well as their enduring hold on us. As her title essay explains, she writes in order "to save myself through saving wounded icons . . . Famous people . . . who required my intervention on their behalf because only I understood the desolation that drove them." Here one will encounter a gallery of complex, unforgettable women--Marilyn Monroe, Courtney Love, Diane Keaton, and Cate Blanchett, among others--as well as such intriguing male figures as Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Truman Capote, and Richard Burton. Merkin reflects with empathy and discernment on what makes them run--and what makes them stumble. Drawing upon her many years as a book critic, Merkin also offers reflections on writers as varied as Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, John Updike, and Alice Munro. She considers the vexed legacy of feminism after Betty Friedan, Bruno Bettelheim's tarnished reputation as a healer, and the reenvisioning of Freud by the elusive Adam Phillips. Most of all, though, Merkin is a writer who is not afraid to implicate herself as a participant in our consumerist and overstimulated culture. Whether ruminating upon the subtext of lip gloss, detailing the vicissitudes of a pre-Yom Kippur pedicure, or arguing against our obsession with household pets, Merkin helps makes sense of our collective impulses. From a brazenly honest and deeply empathic observer, The Fame Lunches shines a light on truths we often prefer to keep veiled--and in doing so opens up the conversation for all of us.

On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags

The Fame Lunches

Woody Allen

Zero Gravity is the fifth collection of comic pieces by Woody Allen, a hilarious prose stylist whose enduring appeal readers have savored since his classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, Side Effects, and Mere Anarchy. This new work combines pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker along with eleven written exclusively for this book, each a comic inspiration. Whether he’s writing about horses that paint, cars that think, the sex lives of celebrities, or how General Tso’s Chicken got its name, he is always totally original, broad yet sophisticated, acutely observant, and most important, relentlessly funny. Along with titles like “Buffalo Wings, Woncha Come Out Tonight” and “When Your Hood Ornament Is Nietzsche,”  included in this collection is his poignant but very funny short story,  "Growing Up in Manhattan.” Daphne Merkin has written the foreword.

Zero Gravity implies writing not to be taken seriously, but, as with any true humor, not all the laughs are weightless.

Zero Gravity

"A collection of essays on everything from handbags to John Updike, lip gloss to Michael Jackson, and everything in between"--

Presents a collection of essays treating such subjects as the Holocaust, fun with spanking, and religious disillusionment

Passions & Provocations

Dreaming of Hitler

A wide-ranging collection of essays by one of America's most perceptive critics of popular and literary culture From one of America's most insightful and independent-minded critics comes a remarkable new collection of essays, her first in more than fifteen years. Daphne Merkin brings her signature combination of wit, candor, and penetrating intelligence to a wide array of subjects that touch on every aspect of contemporary culture, from the high calling of the literary life to the poignant underside of celebrity to our collective fixation on fame. "Sometimes it seems to me that the private life no longer suffices for many of us," she writes, "that if we are not observed by others doing glamorous things, we might as well not exist." Merkin's elegant, widely admired profiles go beneath the glossy façades of neon-lit personalities to consider their vulnerabilities and demons, as well as their enduring hold on us. As her title essay explains, she writes in order "to save myself through saving wounded icons . . . Famous people . . . who required my intervention on their behalf because only I understood the desolation that drove them." Here one will encounter a gallery of complex, unforgettable women—Marilyn Monroe, Courtney Love, Diane Keaton, and Cate Blanchett, among others—as well as such intriguing male figures as Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Truman Capote, and Richard Burton. Merkin reflects with empathy and discernment on what makes them run—and what makes them stumble. Drawing upon her many years as a book critic, Merkin also offers reflections on writers as varied as Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, John Updike, and Alice Munro. She considers the vexed legacy of feminism after Betty Friedan, Bruno Bettelheim's tarnished reputation as a healer, and the reenvisioning of Freud by the elusive Adam Phillips. Most of all, though, Merkin is a writer who is not afraid to implicate herself as a participant in our consumerist and overstimulated culture. Whether ruminating upon the subtext of lip gloss, detailing the vicissitudes of a pre–Yom Kippur pedicure, or arguing against our obsession with household pets, Merkin helps makes sense of our collective impulses. From a brazenly honest and deeply empathic observer, The Fame Lunches shines a light on truths we often prefer to keep veiled—and in doing so opens up the conversation for all of us.

A bold, provocative "pioneering novel" (Los Angeles Times) about family, womanhood, and growing up Set on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Enchantment is narrated by Hannah Lehmann, the wry survivor of a troubled childhood. Hannah's perceptions of her Orthodox German Jewish heritage—her five brothers and sisters, the complicated power of families, the madness of money, the obsessive workings of memory itself—are as disquieting in their sharpness as they are lucid in their irony. The world, she finds, is a treacherous place where love is closely knit with pain, but even the limitations of her own point of view are not lost on Hannah. She is all too aware that her perspective is fixed in the vise of her childhood: “My mother,” she says, “is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.” This is a novel about what people say when they are talking to themselves; what families look like when they are not observed by others. Provocative, hawkishly observed, and devastating in its reliability, Daphne Merkin's Enchantment is a searing and unforgettable exploration of family and self.

Daphne Merkin

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