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...genre they founded has lived on, and each decade has given it a different period savor. The 1990s produced slacker crack-ups like Girl, Interrupted and Prozac Nation. Now, in the 2000s, we have Hurry Down Sunshine (Other Press; 234 pages), Michael Greenberg's account of his daughter Sally's psychotic break, which she experienced at the tragically precocious...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Brief Lives | 9/18/2008 | See Source »

...strangers on the street. She frightened her friends. She was certain she was on the verge of titanic revelations that she had a duty to share with the world. Her sentences became tangled strings of self-devouring wordplay. "People get up-set when they feel set up," she told Greenberg. "Do you feel set up, Father...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Brief Lives | 9/18/2008 | See Source »

...Greenberg took her to an emergency room, and with inexorable swiftness Sally was ingested by the medical world, pronounced psychotic and committed to a locked ward. Greenberg joined the ranks of huddled pilgrims who lined up every day for visiting hours. (One morning he took artichokes to Sally. "Art makes you choke, Father," she said. "You should give it up. It's a false god who causes you nothing but pain.") As Sally's life fell apart from the inside out, Greenberg's began collapsing from the outside in. He fought with his wife, Sally's stepmother. He drank...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Brief Lives | 9/18/2008 | See Source »

...terrible irony of Hurry Down Sunshine is that you can hear in Greenberg's beautiful figurative language the not-so-distant echo of Sally's manic speech. They're both full of surprise metaphorical connections ("her eyes turn to polished coal") and abrupt right-angle turns. His literary talent is not unrelated to her curse: the startling associative imagery that gives his writing its power is like a domesticated version of the madness that nearly carried away his daughter's life...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Brief Lives | 9/18/2008 | See Source »

...Greenberg's daughter lost her mind. Elizabeth McCracken's son never had time to find his. He died in her womb when she was nine months pregnant. There can be few grimmer topics for a book than a stillborn baby, but I'll say this for McCracken's memoir, the unwieldily titled An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (Little, Brown; 192 pages): it's the funniest book about a dead baby that you will ever read...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Brief Lives | 9/18/2008 | See Source »

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