Hurry Down Sunshine

Book excerpt: At the age of 15, during one long and difficult summer, Michael Greenberg’s daughter, Sally, was struck mad. Her visionary crack-up occurred on the streets of Greenwich Village and continued, among other places, in the lost-in-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during New York City’s most sweltering months. Hurry Down Sunshine is Greenberg’s journey toward comprehending mental illness in his own family. With touching honesty and intimacy, he reveals the effect of Sally’s mania on those closest to her, including her easygoing brother, her stalwart grandmother, her new-age mother, her artistic, loving stepmother—and, finally, on himself. Unsentimental, nuanced and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine is a transcendent memoir about mental illness and the restorative power of one father’s love for his daughter.