Amanda Craig

Depression – an agony more powerful than love

A review of Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me — My Journey Through Depression, by Rachel Kelly. A harrowing memoir of how a sea of monsters took hold of a successful woman

[Getty Images/iStockphoto] 
issue 17 May 2014

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.

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