Michael Greenberg is a New York novelist. This memoir about the psychotic breakdown of his daughter has been a bestseller in the US and earned admiration from readers as various as Oprah Winfrey and Joyce Carol Oates. It would be easy to suspect him of being one of a growing number of writers who, when their children are ambushed by life, cannot resist making a memoir out of the raw material - writers who seem to put the book before the child.
But I had not got far before I realised that this is not an invasive memoir - at least not where his daughter, Sally, is concerned. And that is because madness resists invasion. Greenberg is like someone longing to understand a language he does not speak, straining for sense, grabbing at occasional phrases that might be a clue to Sally's mania (she is diagnosed as bipolar). But she is closed to him. He writes beautifully, but he is more helpless than calculating. After being hospitalised and heavily medicated, Sally's own inscrutable comment on the situation is: "They stole my words."
Madness struck her with terrifying speed. At the age of 15 she became convinced that everyone is born a genius (a delusion with a Blakean quality). She believed we are unjustly divorced from our genius as we grow up, and saw herself as the force that could reunite people with their lost spark. As it happened, a lost spark is what she became herself - fired by fanaticism, button-holing strangers in restaurants, running out into traffic, convinced her evangelical mission would stop the cars. She was lucky, her father reflects, not to have been killed.
Like him, Sally has a feeling for words whenever medication allows. She is an inveterate punster and Greenberg enjoys her word-play, although he must have had mixed feelings after a saga involving artichokes and chocolate - the foods she most desired in hospital. When Greenberg - belatedly - realised her demands were real and visited her with an artichoke, complete with dressing, her response was instant: "Art," she told him firmly, "chokes you."
Not much mileage in that. But the positive side effect of being exiled from real conversation with his daughter is to make Greenberg gratefully and minutely observant of everyone else in his story. And the rest of his cast captivates. His portraits of his wives Robin (ex) and Pat (current) are especially brilliant. About Robin, he is circumspect. She emerges as a dreamy, talented, self-involved New Ager, and he is excellent at conveying their shared embarrassment when Sally expresses her exalted conviction that she has brought her estranged parents back together again.
But the character who makes the memoir is Pat. It is a wonderful portrait of a stepmother. We gather that even Pat's walk is complicated: "self-regarding yet with an opposing wish to go unnoticed". She is ascetic yet cautiously luxurious; no other character competes.
Sally's future is uncertain but she approved the book and wanted her father to use her "real name". What Greenberg makes you see is not only that madness is a form of possession but also - a less familiar idea - that the return to sanity might feel like dispossession.
