HURRY
DOWN SUNSHINE In this beautifully written and heartbreakingly honest memoir, Greenberg shares his firsthand account of coming to terms with his daughter’s mental illness. While books such as An Unquiet Mind and Girl, Interrupted have become perennial classics on the subject, Greenberg’s narrative is unique in that it shares a father’s perspective on coping with a child who suffers from bipolar disorder. On July 5, 1996, Greenberg’s fifteen-year-old daughter Sally was struck mad. It began with her crack-up on the streets of Manhattan’s West Village and led to a violent rage in the Greenberg’s nearby apartment. “I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” Sally said in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not understand or imagine. She had learned to speak from him; she had heard her first stories from him. And yet from one day to the next they had become strangers. In his book, Greenberg recalls in vivid detail the summer that Sally retreated from reality and the memorable cast of characters they encountered in the Manhattan psychiatric clinic where she was admitted and in the subsequent course of her treatment. HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE is a chronicle of the journey and its effect on Sally and those closest to her, including her mother, brother, grandmother, step-mother and, of course, her father who brilliantly interweaves their story with that of famous writer James Joyce, whose own daughter had a similar affliction he referred to as “the most elusive disease known to man and unknown to medicine.” A native New Yorker, Greenberg is a columnist for the Times Literary Supplement, and contributing editor to the Boston Review. National publicity out of New York.
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