Rachel Kelly, a respected former journalist on the Times, might seem the most blessed of women: five children, marriage to the banker Sebastian Grigg and a large house in Notting Hill. However, soon after her second child was born she suffered a breakdown of a most acute kind.
Terrified, and in such distress that all she could keep saying over and over was ‘I’m going to crash,’ her account of her illness is harrowing to read. It follows the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak’s recent description of her post-natal depression, Black Milk, Stephanie Merritt’s 2008 memoir The Devil Within and Andrew Solomon’s masterly The Noonday Demon. All follow a particular pattern, of an outwardly successful individual who sinks through the surface tension of the ordinary world into a sea of monsters.
Kelly’s description of her body’s responses bring home how dreadful depression is. ‘Like any other organ in your body, your brain can go wrong,’ she puts it. She went into the flight or fight response previously experienced during an ill-fated plane journey to Dubai (hence her screams that she was ‘going to crash’), only the response went on, unremittingly and exhaustingly, day after day. Paralysed by terror, she was lucky insofar as she had the best kind of backup in the form of a remarkable husband and mother, a nanny and a family doctor whom she trusted. Prozac and Seroxat were prescribed, unsuccessfully. Burning with ‘an agony more powerful than love’, she was hospitalised as a serious suicide risk.
Kelly writes with honesty, lucidity and directness about an experience which her heroic husband, in the afterword, describes as a ‘car crash’. What makes her memoir unusual is that she not only went on to have three more children but that she found succour and healing through poetry.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in