I’ve admired literary critic
for many years, and last year, when I learned she was writing a memoir that would focus on her experience with depression, I knew it would be a needed addition to the genre. And yes, I consider Bethanne a midlife author: Life B is her debut as a memoirist, at age 59. Last spring, I interviewed Bethanne over Zoom, and the interview ran earlier this winter in Literary Mama.Telling the truth helps us heal
Bethanne Patrick is a literary citizen extraordinaire: She reviews books regularly for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. She edited the anthology The Books That Changed My Life, and she serves on the board of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation. As @TheBookMaven on Twitter (back in 2009, when bookish Twitter felt like a very different place), she created the hashtag #FridayReads. She’s also the mom of two young adult daughters. Underneath and alongside all of these achievements, Patrick has struggled with her mental health. At age 52 she was diagnosed with double depression. Patrick’s new memoir, Life B: Overcoming Double Depression (Counterpoint Press, 2023), is a candid, eloquent retelling of this midlife diagnosis, the familial legacies that contributed to her illness, and her journey to wholeness. “When you can’t see the blackboard in your classroom, you know that your eyes need help; you don’t think that the board itself is the problem,” she writes, in the book’s introduction. “When you can’t see the good in your life, you think your life is all wrong. Depression tells you there is no help to be had, no quarter for refuge, no hand to hold.”
It took five years for me to get the book out of myself. So much of writing nonfiction is the process of learning about ourselves, not just learning how to write. I have miles to go before I sleep in terms of writing, but on the level of knowing yourself, you learn so much while writing a memoir.
—Bethanne Patrick
Sarah McCraw Crow: Can you talk a little about double depression? I hadn’t heard of it until I read Life B.
Bethanne Patrick: Double depression has actually been in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) since the early 1980s, but I think a lot of people still don’t know about it, even some psychiatrists and GPs. A person who has treatment-resistant depression and a first-degree relative with bipolar syndrome may be diagnosed as doubly depressed, which means chronic depression with episodes of major depression.
It got particularly noticeable for me during puberty, but I’d always had bad periods of sadness, and always knew that I was often really, really low. Double depression gets worse once you’ve had an episode of major depression. As my psychiatrist said, “You’re beyond the algorithm now, because you’ve had so many clearcut episodes of major depression that you need to be medicated for your entire life. You cannot go back to an unmedicated state.” That was very tough to hear—to know that I have something that can’t be cured, that’s going to be with me forever. Just as someone with lupus or type 2 diabetes has to manage their disease, I know I’ve got to manage my disease.
SMC: Did you get the sense that something had clicked into place with the diagnosis, like puzzle pieces coming together?
BP: Yes, it was a huge relief. I was put on—along with antidepressants—a medication called Trileptol, which is meant to stop the cycling, to keep me from going lower, or slipping into major depression. There are other factors, like not exhausting myself, but once I started taking that medication, it changed my life completely. Not because it by itself is a wonder drug, but because that combination of things finally allowed me to experience joy and contentment, which were two states that I hadn’t had much of. Of course, I’d had moments of joy, like my wedding day, and when our daughters were born. When I say I was depressed every day, it doesn’t mean there weren’t breakthrough moments, just like there are breakthrough problems. But the combination of antidepressants and Trileptol allowed me to see something I hadn’t seen for 52 years.
SMC: You mentioned that Life B grew, in part, out of a 2016 essay you wrote for Elle.com that went viral. Had you considered memoir writing before that?
BP: I always thought at this point that I’d be writing fiction, and that I’d have published more fiction by now. I wasn’t intending to write a memoir at all. But my agent asked what I was really interested in writing about, and we decided this should be a book about depression.
As creative nonfiction, memoir is close to fiction, requiring so much time and rumination. It took five years for me to get the book out of myself. So much of writing nonfiction is the process of learning about ourselves, not just learning how to write. I have miles to go before I sleep in terms of writing, but on the level of knowing yourself, you learn so much while writing a memoir. I had no idea that I was going to write about being able to see myself as a woman who’s mentally ill, but nonetheless whole, and able to live a really good life.
SMC: I love that, about memoir writing and learning about ourselves. So inheritance and legacy are a big part of this story too, both genetic and cultural. Can you talk a little about that?
BP: My father’s mother was hospitalized for postpartum depression after giving birth to my father’s younger brother. This was in 1932, and it was very shameful. All I can say is that something must have happened to her because I have these pictures of her from when my father was a toddler, and her head is thrown back in laughter. The grandmother that I knew was a woman almost without affect, and the only state she was ever in was a state of nerves. My mother would occasionally say to me, “Oh, your grandmother is a fussbudget, she is so dithery. I just don’t like being around her.” I can see why, because she was just not all there. Maybe she received some kind of early psychiatric treatment that took something away from her.
If I had known earlier in my life about her hospitalization, I might have been able to bring that information to a doctor, and say, “I had two grandmothers who had severe mental challenges.” Initially, I was looking at mentally ill women in my family and thinking, I don’t want to be like you, instead of thinking, How am I like you? What can this teach me?
SMC: You’re a mother of two young adults, and I think many readers will relate to your efforts to get help, learning plans, and eventually ADHD diagnoses when your daughters were younger. I appreciated your candor in recounting conversations with your daughters. For instance, you asked one daughter what she’d missed out on during the years when you were “invisible” because of your depression.
BP: I am so proud of our daughters and the fact that both of them are really intentional and mindful about their own care. They keep up with their medication and they’re able to say, “This is just something I need to do to function well. This is not anything that I need to be ashamed of.” It’s a generational difference. Previously, admitting weakness of any kind was just not possible.
One reader told me that he appreciated that there were times I allowed myself to appear unsympathetic in the book. Still, I didn’t plan on those times or try to create an unsympathetic moment. It’s just the truth. Our little family has healed and changed so much. Certainly since the diagnosis I’ve been able to be so much happier. I still have moments—we all have moments—but we understand, too, that we can’t go back and change the years when I was almost invisible. We have to enjoy what we have now, and really make it count.
SMC: All memoirists struggle with deciding what’s their story to tell and what’s not. How did you approach this?
BP: Very clumsily, and I would do things differently if I were to write again. I’d have both my mother and sister read it through before turning in the final manuscript. But you’re not always going to find the perfect moment to sit down, have a family dinner, and hand out manuscripts. That doesn’t happen.
There was a specific incident that I thought was important because it illustrated something between my mother and sister, but I eventually realized that this was not my story. My sister wanted me to take out the entire chapter called Snake Hill, because there’s a murder in the family, but this chapter stayed in because it’s about my lack of connection to my mother’s side of the family.
I think there are hard things that I say about my marriage. My marriage is strong; we’ve been together 37 years. We’re friends, lovers, all that good stuff, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t hard things. We got married at 22. We were basically each other’s only company. We brought each other up. In a long marriage like mine, you learn you don’t have to be each other’s everything. That’s part of the journey, too.
In writing the memoir, I tried to adhere closely to the ethics of creative nonfiction. I wanted to ensure that I was telling the truth to the best of my ability. If I couldn’t remember it, I said I didn’t know anything more. As my wonderful editor, Dan Smetanka, said, “This is your truth, do not water it down. Be strong enough to see it through.” I think that is great advice for anyone writing a memoir. You know you do have something to say, so say it.
SMC: That advice for the memoir writer—do not water it down, be strong enough to see it through—can be hard to follow.
BP: Yes. This is a hard-won book. It was tough for me to write, and it will be tough for some to read. For others, I hope it will be helpful or resonant. I’m looking forward to writing and talking about ending the stigma around mental illness—especially around family history and mental illness. If we tell the truth, we can heal so much earlier and so much better.
As my wonderful editor, Dan Smetanka, said, “This is your truth, do not water it down. Be strong enough to see it through.” I think that is great advice for anyone writing a memoir. You know you do have something to say, so say it.
Early 2024 reading recs
This time, I’m highlighting two very big new books (the forthcoming novel James, and the memoir Splinters, just out) and five more that have gotten less attention this winter.
Fiction
Percival Everett’s James (out 3/19/24) will almost certainly be one of 2024’s big novels. Everett’s has recast Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, giving us the perspective of the enslaved Jim. Everett gives us the full humanity of Jim—James—and is true to James’ world and his experience, while also staying true to Twain’s humor and tale-spinning. I reviewed for BookPage and will post more here in a few days, when the review is out.
If you like your WWII fiction with a dash of noir, pick up Elizabeth Brooks’ fourth novel, The Woman in the Sable Coat. Though centered around World War II, The Woman in the Sable Coat isn’t a story of plucky, cheerful British heroines making a difference to the war effort; it’s a darker, more Gothic-leaning story, a little in the vein of Daphne DuMaurier, with secrets and deceptions slowly revealed.
This slow burn of a novel moves between the perspectives of two young women, Nina and Kate, connected by their love of the same man. The novel’s period details feel spot on, along with the sense of the era’s prim morality.
If your quirky inner twenty-something is calling to you: Emily Austin’s second novel, Interesting Facts about Space, a coming-of-age story about Enid, who listens to true-crime podcasts to calm down. “I hate being startled,” Enid notes. “I like my podcasts, horror movies, and ghost stories that I can pause and rewind. I handle fear sort of like a workhorse. I could charge bravely into a planned battle, take in the sights of bombs and corpses, but I would still be spooked by an unanticipated barn rat.”
When we first meet her, Enid is listening to a particularly grisly podcast while baking a gender reveal cake for her pregnant half sister Edna. Into this moment comes a stranger who’s furious at Enid, and the exchange unfolds in such an unexpected way that I laughed out loud more than once. In a lesser writer’s hands, Enid’s quirky traits could feel constructed, but Austin makes Enid’s vulnerable voice and deep thoughts feel brave, heartbreaking and true.
If you miss the old “Can this marriage be saved?” column in Ladies’ Home Journal: Maria Hummel’s Goldenseal, the atmospheric story of a broken friendship that might not be salvageable. As Goldenseal opens in 1990, Edith has arrived in Los Angeles, a city that’s unrecognizable to her after 40 years in Maine. Her destination is a grand hotel she once knew well. Waiting for Edith is Lacey, who’d withdrawn from the world, making herself a recluse high above the city in the hotel her father owned for decades. At 70, Lacey is troubled and fragile, while Edith is restrained, a cipher, “the headmistress incarnate.” Both women have been pummeled by time and by the world.
The present of the novel is one night, during which the two women try to face the old rupture and reconnect. But the women’s vivid past—Lacey’s pampered childhood in Czechoslovakia and New York City, Edith’s impoverished childhood in rural Maine, the two women’s young adulthood in 1950s Hollywood—is what’s most evocative about this unusual novel.
Nonfiction
If you’re mired in early parenthood, or if you love Leslie Jamison’s sharp writing: Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. Jamison focuses her memoir on her first years of newly single motherhood and the unraveling of her marriage. An incisive observer, Jamison braids episodes of her past—her close-knit relationship with her mother, her uncertain relationship with her distant father and her years of drinking and recovery—with her present. She recounts scenes from her courtship with “C,” as she calls her ex-husband, their sudden wedding in Las Vegas and the complications of two writers in a relationship. She mourns the loss of this marriage, questioning her part in its end.
Throughout, Jamison returns to the impossible question of “Am I good enough?” as she details post-marriage relationships with men who remain out of reach, and she is searing in conveying the wanting and shame that crowd disparate corners of her life. It’s all rendered in Jamison’s elegant, vivid, and often sensuous prose.
If you want to know what it’s like to grow up Midwest fundamentalist, and then make a life far outside that world, as a reproductive rights reporter for NPR: Sarah McCammon’s revealing memoir The Exvangelicals (out 3/19/24). I reviewed this one for BookPage, and will post more when the review is out next week.
For more NPR, and if you like memoir mixed with science writing: NPR science reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce’s Transient and Strange, an essay collection that mixes the personal with the scientific. In “The Symbol of a Tornado,” Greenfieldboyce recounts a phase that most parents will recognize: the quest to calm her preschool-age son’s nighttime fears. When he first asks her about tornadoes, she eagerly lays out the facts—a misstep that only intensifies his anxiety. The essay braids substantial reporting on the history and science of tornadoes with her earnest fumbling as she tries to help her kids feel secure in an insecure world.
Some of Transient and Strange’s essays hew closer to science writing—in one, she charts the scientific community’s resistance to accepting black holes—while others go more deeply into personal essay territory, excavating pieces of her youth. It’s a book that you can read as the memoir of a woman who’s measuring the shape of life at its midpoint, and also as a series of essays riffing on a range of science-related topics. Heartfelt and idiosyncratic. 📚
Let me know what you’re reading these days!
I’m catching up on posts I saved in my App to read “later” and just now finally read this. Super interesting and inspiring. Thank you!
There is SO much good stuff in this post, Sarah - such an interesting interview, and I love your book recommendations. I'm less of a fiction reader these days (just can't find anything I like) but I miss that immersive experience, and I love the sound of Percival Everett's James which I hadn't heard about.