The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming, fall 2010

The Mercy of Eternity, a literary memoir, is an account of my efforts to make sense of my ongoing depression (manic depression, or bipolar disorder), to find in the midst of the enervating darkness a healing light.  In detailing my struggle to find a restorative energy from within my soul’s waste, I constantly return to what is the most important question of my life, probably of any life: is suffering meaningful?  This question—one that informs texts ranging from the Book of Job to Oedipus Rex to Hamlet to the poetry of Emily Dickinson—gets to the very heart of life, to the terrifying possibility that pain has no purpose and also to this exhilarating prospect: even in the most agonizing hell, there is significance, form, even a pattern leading, ultimately, to a beauty that intimates all those enduring visions of very heaven.  My narrative in this book vacillates between these two poles, examining the most traumatic and moving experiences of my life in light of the idea—more a hope, really—that my darkest periods have not been for naught, have not been merely meaningless, but have in fact been essential parts of my quest for significance and for love. Certainly there have been many powerful and successful memoirs on the struggle with depression.  I hope that mine can be yet another—not only because I have an interesting and (hopefully) instructive story to tell but also because of my fresh, potentially therapeutic conclusion on the nature of depression.  I realize in the course of my book that my desperate desire to expunge depression, a life-long yearning, was really wrong from the start.   I come to understand that my depression, though it has often been painful and destructive, has been a condition that has, however unexpectedly, led to insight and vitality and ultimately to what I can only call humanity.  The main idea in the book, then, is this: in forgiving the depression, in accepting it as an inevitable and integral part of myself, I transformed the darkness into energy—into insight, creativity, and openness to the large, marvelous world.