The Pretty Sad: Some Notes on Beauty, Sex, and Depression

At twenty-two years old I suffered a nervous collapse that landed me in a Boston psychiatric hospital. Melancholy and anxiety had been staples in my life since I was a teenager, and this mental break was prompted in part by the reunion with a woman who had ended our relationship two years earlier. I had been traipsing around the nation in flight from her and in search of something I could not identify. Young men confuse beauty and love, and so I was confused.

Admittance to a hospital is terrifying and welcoming at once; terrifying because you have relinquished control over your life, and welcoming because you might just get your life back. I had broken down in my shrink's office after not eating or sleeping in over a week; Monique had decided she wanted a reunion and blew back into my life with the force of a gale. My doctor called the mental hospital, and a paddy wagon came to retrieve me. I wish I could be more dramatic and say that I spent seven weeks in a padded room, but I was there for just a short time. That was fine with me. Hayden Carruth's and A. Alvarez's essays on their hospital stays—both writers tried to kill themselves with pills—are documents of horror.

They forced me to eat; I swallowed pills. Someone asked me questions I could not answer, questions about insurance, medication history, suicidal ideations. Then a nurse led me to a bed where I lay down and looked unblinkingly at the white-tiled ceiling. They inserted an IV into my arm, and I watched the clear bag slowly deflate. Soon a social worker wheeled me outside to a table in the shade; he offered encouragement and advice; he said my mother had been called and was on her way to retrieve me. I said nothing to this. In fact I said nothing at all, just stared at the retaining wall around the courtyard and the meandering ivy all over it. I knew my stint in Boston was finished now, my job was lost, and I remembered something Monique had said to me on the phone a few days earlier: "Come home."

Until then, I spent my time in bed, fluids dripping into my vein. Smiling people floated in and out of my room; some of them spoke to me. I asked a woman what day it was. Trays of food were brought and then taken away. A calmness had entered me, a kind of indifference or acquiescence. I had arrived on the other side of my break; it felt very much like the exhausted emptiness after sex. Sleep came in intervals. The break had drained my head, and so I had trouble thinking; I tried to recall lines from Virgil and Tennyson, but I could not find them. My dreams were a whitewash; I was either in a snowstorm or on an operating table.

And then I was home. My mother had long since married the man for whom she had left our family; they had recently bought a large three-story house on a lake in western Jersey, not far from the Pennsylvania border. This was about half an hour from my hometown, from my family. When I say "family," I always mean my father, my paternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, since my mother and her side were mostly absent from the lives of my siblings and me.

It is an irony, I suppose, that the people who had raised and supported me after my mother's abandonment were not the people I felt comfortable turning to in my hours of darkness. I was able to let my mother in—she who was, in many ways, responsible for the darkness—simply because she did not subscribe to the working-class machismo, the masculine Hemingway credo, that defined my father and his family. They would have viewed my depression as a sign of weakness or cowardice and would have no doubt believed that my silly ailment was nothing a little manual labor couldn...