Book Review: Creatures of a Day

[osprey_archer]

Someone - I think perhaps goldjadeocean? - recommended Irvin Yalom's Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death to me, and I went to the library today and considered it for a good long time and then decided to read Yalom's Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychoptherapy instead, under the impression that it might be a bit less deathtastic.

Reader, it was not less deathtastic. Or, rather, - as I haven't read Staring at the Sun, perhaps I shouldn't compare deathiness quotients - perhaps I should say that Creatures of a Day is plenty deathy all on its own.

But actually it was rather bracing, and has given me confidence that Staring at the Sun will not be a soul-crushing slog of misery, so perhaps I will read that after all. I tend to have more confidence in psychology books - or philosophy, or history; or really just books about anything - that look squarely at the darkness of life, but there can be a fine line between "looking squarely at the darkness" and "plunging abruptly into the abyss."

I was surprised that Yalom saw so many of his patients so briefly. People are forever dropping by his office determined to deal with all of their problems in three or four sessions, which seems awfully optimistic to me. But then many of his patients seem to be doing well on the whole, aside from the sudden bouts of existential angst that send them to his office.

Actually I found it rather cheering to read this book; I kept thinking, "Hey! I am more fucked up than all these people, and they're still seeking therapy!" (Well, not all of them. There's the terminal cancer patient. But most of them.) If they can do it, I could do it too. It's a nice change from reading a mental health memoir and concluding gloomily that I am still inadequately miserable for therapy.

Probably the problem is selection bias. No one writes - or at least no one publishes - memoirs about Dysthymia: A Slightly Sad Life, or Fretful: My Mild Yet Entertainingly Ridiculous Anxiety Problems. It's always Totally Fucked: How My Crushing Mental Illness Nearly Killed Me Fifteen Times. I can't possibly compete with Totally Fucked. Totally Fucked and I are on such different planets that it's kind of embarrassing that I'm even thinking about getting therapy. I would be taking a slot away from Totally Fucked's tragic brethren, who need it so much more than I do and would probably be much more entertaining for the therapist, to boot.

...I have decided that maybe I should stop reading mental health memoirs, or at least the ones from the point of view of the person having the mental health crisis. They make me feel like I'm a failure at being sad, and that is probably the most ridiculous thing I have ever felt in my life.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yalom is always death-tastic. It's because he's an existentialist.

I think some mental illness memoirs overstate the effect of whatever on their life because that's the subject of the book, so everything that's not about depression/OCD/etc gets left out. Read any random memoir about being a writer if you want to get "Moderate Neurosis: A Life."

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

My undergraduate advisor was an existentialist. He was fond of responding to any iteration of "I can't" with "You mean you don't want to," which was aggravating but usually accurate.

I read a memoir about social anxiety disorder which gave the strong impression that the author spent her whole high school career gazing at the floor mumbling monosyllables. Well, but she was also active in high school musicals and class secretary and president of the French club. Surely there were a few complete sentences in there occasionally.