Hurry Down Sunshine tells the story of the extraordinary summer when, at the age of fifteen, Michael Greenberg’s daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally’s sudden visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city’s most sweltering months. “I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine. Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her–her mother and stepmother, her brother and grandmother, and, not least of all, the author himself.

Among Greenberg’s unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary aspirations. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the listener in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.


From the Compact Disc edition.

Sally emerges from her room in a thin hospital gown, snap buttons, no laces or ties. She suddenly looks ageless. The only other time I've seen her in a hospital was the night she was born. By that point in our marriage her mother and I were like two people drinking alone in a bar. Not hostile, just miles apart. Yet when Sally appeared, a huge optimism came over us, a physical optimism, primitive and momentarily blind. She was her own truth, complete to herself, so beautifully formed that the jaded maternity nurses marveled at what perfection had just slid into the world. Though she has never set foot in a psychiatric hospital, there is the tacit sense from Sally that she is understood here, she is where she belongs. She acts as if a great burden has been lifted from her. At the same time she is more elevated than ever: feral, glitter-eyed. In 1855 a friend of Robert Schumann observed him at the piano in an asylum near Bonn: "like a machine whose springs are broken, but which still tries to work, jerking convulsively." Sally appears to be heading toward this maimed point of perpetual motion. Her sole concern is to get her pen back, which has been confiscated with most of her other belongings--belt, matches, shoelaces, keys, anything with glass, and her comb with half its teeth snapped off by her potent hair. She initiates an agitated negotiation with the nurses, which immediately threatens to boil over into a serious scene. The nurses confer like referees after a disputed call. Then they grant her a felt-tip marker and march her back to her room.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

 

"Lucid, realistic, compassionate, and illuminating... In its detail, depth, richness and sheer intelligence, Hurry Down Sunshine will be recognized as a classic of its kind."

 

"[Hurry Down Sunshine] is about tenacity and tenderness, feeling helpless but being present, about cracking up, then finding the wherewithal to glue the jagged pieces of your mind back together again. But mostly it's about love."

 

"Triumphant. . . . Greenberg renders the details of his daughter's breakdown with lyrical precision."

 

"There is a dancing, dazzling siren seductress at the heart of this book and . . . [it is] madness itself. . . . The startling associative imagery that gives Greenberg's writing its power is like a domesticated version of the madness that nearly carried away his daughter's life."

 

"This memoir of a family crisis captures the grief that transformed their lives. . . . readers come away with a sense of the intractable nature of psychosis and the courage it requires for patients like Sally, whose struggles continue, merely to live."

 

"[Hurry Down Sunshine's] fundamental strength arises from Greenberg's insistence on facing the demons that held his girl in their dark thrall. Sally's descent and tentative return form the map for this story; Greenberg's courage lies in his willingness to follow her down that terrible path, no matter where it leads."

 

"[A] remarkable account."

 

"[A] finely observed memoir. . . . written in delicately episodic style. Vivid."

 

"Touching, warmly intimate, and unsparing. . . . Like the best fiction, this memoir has transcended the merely particular and eccentric to constitute a kind of hard-won art."

 

"Beautifully written. . . . The literary precedents Greenberg turns to are Joyce and Robert Lowell . . . There are echoes of Virginia Woolf, too . . . Sally's psychiatrist calls . . . the mind falling in love with its delusions . . . 'the evil seduction'. But Greenberg can understand the impulse, and it's this that gives Hurry Down Sunshine such power."

 

"A story of almost mythic power. . . . A compelling narrative about how one family coped with madness. . . . Tough and lyrical. . . . Greenberg brings a true writer's sensibility to every line."

 

"[A] moving, brutally self-examining and unsettling memoir."

 

"[Greenberg] writes beautifully. . . . [He is] gratefully and minutely observant . . . His cast captivates."