Product Description
Things That Helped is a memoir in essays, detailing the Australian writer Jessica Friedmann's recovery from postpartum depression. In each essay she focuses on a separate totemic object―from pho to red lips to the musician Anohni―to tell a story that is both deeply personal and culturally resonant. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and her own experience, Friedmann's wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness. Occasionally confrontational, but always powerfully moving and beautifully observed, Things That Helped charts her return into the world: a slow and complex process of reassembling what depression fractured, and sometimes broke.
Reviews/Praise
"By carefully and deliberately describing the pain, dissociation, discomfort, alienation, and other forms of havoc she experienced after birthing her son, Friedmann legitimates and recognizes the physical, psychological, and political features of postpartum depression." ―Booklist
"[Friedmann] writes with brutal originality." —Terri Apter, The Times Literary Supplement
"To read these essays is to observe a keen intelligence at work both coolly analyzing the social forces and gender expectations that inform our understanding of this condition, while grappling with powerful feelings that bewilder and appall [Friedmann]." —Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald
"It's incredible to read Friedmann engaging with so many voices without having them, even for a minute, drown out her own." —Grace McCarter, Hot Chicks with Big Brains