Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression
by Gwyneth Lewis
243pp, Flamingo, £14.99
Sunbathing In The Rain is such a lovely title for a book about beating depression. Gentle and elliptical, it still tells us everything we need to know. A Cheerful Book About Depression is a horrible, leaden subtitle, reminiscent of the worst kind of How To guide. They suggest two very different books.
Lewis takes us through the few highs and many lows of a depression that left her dead to the world in her late 30s. She examines the triggers for the depression - alarm bells ringing on the hormonal clock; struggling with two careers as a BBC administrator and poet; a crisis of confidence in her poetry. She tells us that she is genetically susceptible - her mother's depression threw a silent curse over her childhood.
Ultimately, though, she succumbs for the simple reason that she is a depressive. Lewis shows how she struggles for energy, for breath, for hope, before it knocks her out. At times, she writes with clarity, beauty and metaphorical precision. "I'd look around the room and would be almost scared by how solid the furniture seems, how assertive the wallpaper. The folds in the curtain seemed to have authority." Lewis is thoroughly stripped of self, and throws in a Zen quote to explain her hollowness. "You are so bereft of personality that even if you wanted to hang yourself you couldn't find a self to hang."
She conveys the darkness, the silence, the selfishness, the mental clutter of depression brilliantly. The rhythm of the book - deliberately fractured with random quotes from any number of sources (Solomon, Nietzsche, the Daily Telegraph) - echoes the rhythm of depression. One of my favourites is the Spanish proverb: "It's good to do nothing, and then to rest." Lewis says she wants this book to be easy to pick up and read at any page. Which it is.
But the corollary is that it also becomes easy to put down at any page. Not least when it becomes A Cheerful Book About Depresssion. At times, Lewis becomes the kind of list-maker you'd expect to find in a Nick Hornby novel. And most of the lists are windy variants on the same theme - depression enables you to get in touch with your truth, is enriching, is good for you.
No. Depression is miserable and crippling. Coming through the void in one piece may be good for you, but the depression itself isn't. And, of course, many people don't emerge from that void. They kill themselves, or neuter themselves with drugs or lock themselves away.
Lewis claims that people who are depressed have stopped lying to themselves. Again, this is too simplistic. Depression is such a complex mix of self-knowledge and self-deceit. Too much truth can cause depression. And the solution to depression so often is to cushion yourself from the truth - you withdraw from people and situations not because you are realising a greater truth but because it is easier. And a classic symptom of depression, as she notes earlier, is that you lose all grasp of truth.
The thing I most envied of undepressed friends was their ability to judge things objectively - to be miserable because something miserable was happening, to be happy because something happy was happening. It's not that I disagree with all Lewis says when she's at her most didactic. "Listen to what depression is telling you, and change your life accordingly," is sound advice. But it's so yucky.
If you strip away the handy hints, this is a delicate, vulnerable triumph. I smiled with recognition at the comforters (porridge with syrup and sultanas) and the torpid inadequacies of the recovering depressive (taking a whole day to make goulash).
By the end she has put her life in order. Lewis says she wouldn't swap it for anything now, and takes us to the National Museum of Wales to explain why. Her favourite exhibit is a broken Japanese plate that has been repaired. Apparently, the masters of the Japanese tea ceremony would deliberately drop precious dishes so they could be restored to something more beautiful than the original.
· Simon Hattenstone is the author of Out of It (Sceptre)
