Sunday, August 19, 2007

No cats at all...

Just my latest review covering a different area of interest, mental illness and memoir: my San Francisco Chronicle review of Elyn Sach's memoir, "The Center Cannot Hold."

2 comments:

Leora Skolkin-Smith said...

Hi, Clea. I just finished a work of fiction about a mentally ill woman in the 1974's, so I really, really appreciated this critique and how you recognized the huge gap between the times when medications weren't available and clarity of many current memoirs. (That is because medication has been available.

Getting that historical and generational perspective feels so important to me. And profound new questions arise. Great review!

Clea Simon said...

Thanks, Leora~!
You should realize that medications have been available since at least the '50s. Just that the new ones are much more effective -- they don't work for everybody, and they may not last forever. But they work better for more people. As folks in the mental health world say, "not curable, but more treatable."