JOANNE (joann) - , reviewed on 4/15/2007 + 408 more book reviews

"My family has a grand tradition. After a woman gives birth, she goes mad. I thought that I would be the one to escape."
So begins Adrienne Martini's candid, compelling, and darkly humorous history of her family's and her own experiences with depression and postpartum syndrome.
Illuminating depression from the inside, Martini delves unflinchingly into her own breakdown and institutinalization and traces the multigenerational course of this devastinting problem. Moving back and forth between characters and situations, she vividly portrays the isolation-geographical and metaphorical-of the Appalachia of her forebears and the Western Pennsylvania where she grew up. She also weaves in the stories of other women, both contemporaty and historic, who have dealt with postpartum depression in all its guises, from fleeting "baby blues" to full-blown psychosis.

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