Composing Myself

This powerful, skillfully written memoir describes the year-long depression that afflicted the British author after childbirth. Shaw and her husband, Hugh, were delighted with their second daughter, when she suddenly became depressed and unable to function. She provides wrenching details of the hospitalization that followed, during which she attempted to starve herself and deliberately struck and cut her body. The electric-shock therapy prescribed for her resulted in so much memory loss that she began writing, both to recall her life and to find an explanation for her breakdown. Although Shaw attributes her collapse to postpartum depression, it's evident from her childhood recollections that the birth triggered and activated a longstanding mental distress. Emotionally torn between her divorced parents, Shaw pretended when she was 12 to have severe back pain that resulted in two unnecessary operations; later, she became seriously bulimic. She notes that her writing is a process to recovery that psychiatric treatments were unable to cure, and she is now working on her first novel. (May)