Secular Churches: A Bibliophile's Paean to the Library

Photo: Glyn Lowe

When psychotherapist Thomas Mann writes about the need to incorporate soul into daily life, he distinguishes soul from spirit. The latter is transcendent, visionary, concerned with going forward; soul, in contrast, is grounded: concerned with the past, with memory, with the earth. Libraries nurture both my soul and my spirit. They are about the familiar, the comfortable, the known, but also the unexpected leap of intellectual and literary adventure, and the very anticipation of those adventures.

Every time I enter my local library I relive one of my most pleasant early memories: my father taking me to Malvern Library in High Street when I was about four. Surely I must have accompanied one or other of my parents to the library before this, but on this memorable occasion he signed me up as a borrower with her very own library card. I have never lost my reverence for libraries since.

Church was another early experience of soul. It held a quantum of familiar faces, school mates and their parents, choir members, a community of sorts; but it dictated the hushing of the voice, the quelling of the body’s tongue and momentum while grumpy Father Riley droned on to a God who was depicted on the cross as, well, dead. Every five minutes I turned around and checked the clock that hung over the back door. Pacing myself through each segment, the lion’s share endured once communion swung into gear. That was always a change at least, watching people shuffling obediently up to the alter like prisoners queuing for lunch.

The library was different. Just as hushed, just as respectful, but this time there was a point to the quiet, enabling a very different kind of communion with an equally absent presence. It was the sound of a hundred minds encountering the bright imagination of an author via the words on the page. A hundred small adventures, a hundred serendipitous discoveries, a hundred love affairs with the written word being carried on silently in this homely, local place that nevertheless offered many windows to the wider world, like the magic windows of Play School.

But discovering books was as sensual as it was abstracted. When you pulled the covers of the books back, their spines cracked and the opaque plastic on the covers broke free with a squishing noise. When you took the books to be checked out, the librarian pressed each one against a grey metal machine that recorded the date of issue. The deep clunky sound this made expressed the most complete satisfaction, and seemed to deliver each book to me alone with a unique authority.

I soon became addicted to books. This was my weakness and my strength. I did not always attend to the present book closely enough; I was thinking of the next one. While we were still at the house in Manning Road, after a visit to the library I would sit on the step between the kitchen and the tiny sunroom and go through my stash. It had to be at least five at a time. I swallowed them like Tic Tacs. At first they were picture books but it didn’t take me long to graduate to the proper books with chapters that belonged on the freestanding shelving in the middle of the children’s book section, a large sunny room with child-sized reading benches set at the perfect angle for comfortable perusing.

It was the serendipitous find I craved. I still go into nostalgic reveries when I recall some of these discoveries. Most were English, probably some American, very few Australian.

I was especially drawn to books that had a poignant, nostalgic edge or tipped over into the darkness of the occult. Charley by Joan G. Robinson (now called The Girl Who Ran Away) is the wistful tale of a runaway who moves into a chicken coop near the aunt she is convinced does not want her, and gets to know the local community while playing a series of fictional roles. A Candle in Her Room was the darkest of Ruth M. Arthur’s haunting tales. It’s about several generations of an ancient Welsh family, all haunted by an evil doll called Dido; the spare illustrations by Margery Gill were as important as the text. It’s out of print now, yet so sought after that hardback copies in good condition sell online for as much as two hundred and sixty five dollars.

It’s heartening – and very soulful in Thomas Mann’s sense – to see the way the internet links older readers like me with the past by making new and old editions of these books available, offering Goodreads reviews and helping to jog our memories on titles and author names, with a little help from Google. Just yesterday I tracked down the name of another book I had loved, All About the Bullerby Children by Astrid Lindgren.

It's no surprise that there's now a forum where members can post requests for information about books they revered as children but have forgotten the titles of. This is perfect for those books whose titles and authors have fled from the memory forever, while the stories themselves, with their themes of loss and longing, linger in the heart.

I remember being transfixed by the tale of a young girl who accidentally left her favourite doll in the park one sunny afternoon. When she realised what she’d done she and her nurse rushed back to search for it, but the doll was nowhere to be found. The months passed and the seasons turned, and yet the little girl always kept a lookout. The more time that passed, the more beautiful the doll became in the child’s mind, the grander her outfit, the brighter her eyes, the lusher her hair, until she was the very model of the perfect doll.

And then one day, in the middle of a heavy winter, on a familiar walk in the park, the dog nosed out something under the snow – a wrecked, sorry thing that might once have been a doll, its clothes in rags, its shoes gone, wisps of hair and perhaps an eye missing. It was the little girl’s doll. Could there be a harsher lesson than this, for both the heroine and the reader, about the dangers of excessive imagination and the hard thud of reality (if anyone by chance has any knowledge of this book please let me know)? And doesn't this story resonate, making us think of old flames whose recent photos convey a distressing physical deterioration compared with the idealised image the mind has created.

The enduring charm of the library

Libraries are unique environments because they represent the communal spirit that made so much social progress possible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but is now under threat. If council-funded libraries had never been thought of up to now, and someone suggested them, the idea would be labelled bolshie, radical and socialist by the loony right. Libraries represent what we can achieve when we pool our resources for a common good.

When the conservative Coalition fought its successful election campaign in the state of Victoria in 2010, it failed to mention that it planned to slash funding to local libraries. In 2011 councils were left reeling when they were told that recurrent funding for public library operating costs would be cut by up to $7.1 million over four years. There was so much outcry that the government quickly backtracked, providing assurances that the funding would be maintained while it undertook a review of Victorian library services and funding arrangements; the fight is not over yet. (In the meantime it took an axe to TAFE colleges, but that’s another story.)

I’m always heartened by the sight of people kicking back in libraries and reading the paper at the communal tables, or poring over a novel in a secluded corner. I find this very hard to do myself. For some reason I can only relax to that extent at home, but for me, these communal readers are part of what makes the library worth going to. Because my local library is currently closed for renovations I go to a newly built one in Camberwell. It’s spacious and tall-ceilinged, and there are cushy beanbags arranged against one of the walls, inviting you to plump down and wile away an hour with the printed word. I haven’t seen anyone on those beanbags as yet; I’d like to think that when the nearby primary school finishes up every afternoon the local kids come streaming in and head for the beanbags, but if they do I bet they use them to play on their tablets and smart phones.

I still believe in serendipity, still comb the shelves for new discoveries; one of my recent browses yielded This Is How by M.J. Hyland and Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond, by Jane Haas. But I understand I can't rely on chance alone for my book thrills; I reserve books I've read about on the review pages of the weekend papers. I’ve just finished my library copy of Kate Atkinson's excellent Life after Life and I’ll be reading Christos Tsiolkas’s latest book Barracuda that way too, but I think I’ll be in for a long wait.

I am as hopelessly addicted to the mixed-lollies potential of libraries as I ever was as a child, and after all these years I do not have the willpower to  borrow only as many books as I have the time to read (I will often borrow new books while there are others sitting at home unread from last time). There are always a few that I have to return without having read them, having gone through the two renewals that are usually permitted. 

Memories of libraries past

I actually worked in a council library service for a year, in 1985. I lived with my parents and saved up for a five-month trip to Europe. I am glad I did this because it satisfied my curiosity – I decided I didn’t want to become a librarian, it was too dull. I did little else but shelve books, mend them, and check them in and out. However, although I was a library assistant only, because I had an arts degree I was allowed to do the occasional reference query; this was the 1985 version of googling and made a nice change from the endless wielding of the computer wand.

Now I curse my lack of imagination – this was an era before libraries had started holding the book discussions, author talks, adult storytimes and competitions that now pepper their calendars. If I’d thought about it I could have livened up ‘sleepy hollow’, our fond name for our branch library, which was surrounded by a vibrant Jewish community and not far away from the arty grunginess of St Kilda.

But I was only 22 after all. It took all my willpower to stay in the job because I had a bad case of love shyness (love avoidance would be more accurate) powered by OCD, panic and social anxiety. My fears centred on the young gay man whose job it was to transfer the books from one library branch to the next. He always did his rounds in the early afternoon and I would blush furiously when the glass doors swung open and he waltzed in. He ended up thinking I hated him, as I bristled if he approached me; the opposite was the case, I was a little in love with him, everybody was, but I couldn't and still find it hard to distinguish sexual feelings from feelings of love. He had so much life force in him, I could see it in the challenge of his liquid dark eyes, which reflected both a sense of anarchy and a narcissism that was forgivable – he resembled a short, slightly built version of James Dean, but was better looking. My fantasies of him were fairly chaste; we played hide-and-seek in a huge mansion with sweeping staircase and enormous chintz curtains of pale gold. When this clip for the new Tears for Fears single ‘Head over heels’ first played on Countdown while both of us were still slaves to the library service, I felt as if the yearnings of my soul had been bared for the entire world to see. Needless to say such tumultous emotions have done nothing to reduce the charm of libraries for me (he was only the first of a short series of male library workers I had crushes on; the women were unexciting). 

With the arrival of ebooks I refuse to fear the loss of the local library. I think it will stay around in some form or another as a gathering place for those who value the life of the mind, whether they’re two or eighty-two. Libraries are both a place of refuge from neoliberal madness, and the secular world’s answer to churches, and long may they remain so.

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Book News

Here’s an update of my publishing adventures ...

I’ve now published a book about Birthday Depression! It makes no claims to cure it, doesn’t tell readers to just get over it. Instead it offers some keys to understanding, and perhaps even benefiting from it – looking beyond the balloons and streamers of the ‘celebration’ to what’s really going on underneath.

The book is available to US readers,  UK readers and now there is a separate Amazon Australia site.  (There are also several other country sites but too many to list.) 

Unfortunately at the moment if you’re buying in Australia, you can’t click to see the book on the Australian site – have a look inside on the US or the UK sites.

My memoir now has a review! The reviewer gave it five stars which is extremely gratifying.

Of course this is exciting but I want to reiterate that I am interested in getting a wide range of feedback about the book. I do not expect every reader to have the same reaction to it.

I’ve also updated the memoir – it now has a new title and blurb.

If you don’t have an ereader, don’t despair. You can download free Kindle apps for your tablet, smart phone or computer (PC or Mac).

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Memoirs of Madness: Five of the Best

The memoir of madness has been with us far longer than Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar or William Styron’s Darkness Visible. Firsthand accounts of life beyond the limits of sanity have been around from at least the early nineteenth century, as this alluring bibliography attests. 

Below I’ve picked five of my favourites, all dealing with illness that includes elements of psychosis. I’ve chosen these memoirs because they are all vividly written and because they provide vital insights into the treatment and lifestyle needs of people with mental illness. Each and every one of these memoirs makes the loud and clear declaration that it is never more important to view the mentally ill person as a complete human being with human needs and emotions than when they are most acutely ill.

Madness: A Bipolar Life by Marya Hornbacher

Already a classic in the field, Hornbacher’s riveting immediacy, hold-onto-your-hat style and liquid prose make this memoir un-put-down-able, even as the reader squirms. She ignores her bipolar diagnosis, ditches her medication and descends into alcoholism, destructive relationships and psychosis before colliding with the consequences of her illness and making a slow journey back to sanity. Meeting her husband Jeff, finding meaningful work and suffering extended stays in a psychiatric ward are all part of the fabric of this painful and visceral but ultimately uplifting memoir.

Madness: A Memoir by Kate Richards

This memoir is written in the tradition of Hornbacher’s but Richards has a talent and voice that are hers alone. Richards’s seductive prose demonstrates that great pain and suffering can actually amplify the sensory perceptions that make life rich and meaningful. At the start of the memoir the narrator’s psychotic depression has left her an emotional adolescent, addicted to sleeping pills, dependent on alcohol and lacking in life skills. But sustained by music, literature, philosophy and the outdoors, meaningful work as a medical researcher, strong friendships and the support of a wise psychologist, Kate and the reader emerge into the daylight – with all the down sides as well as the joys and possibilities that stem from coming to terms with life and chronic illness.

One of the key strengths of this memoir is the passages written while the narrator is in psychosis, seemingly drawn from Richards’s diaries. They explore the limits of meaning, collapsing the difference between subject and object and demonstrating the dangers and lure of madness. At the same time the memoir encompasses vivid accounts of episodes in psychiatric hospitals and a grounded critique of Australia’s mental health system.

Flying with Paper Wings: Reflections on Living with Madness by Sandy Jeffs

Sandy Jeffs is a popular Melbourne poet and an acclaimed community educator on mental illness (in her own words ‘professional lunatic’). In this honest and moving memoir she reflects on a life lived with the chronic illness of schizophrenia following a semi-rural childhood riven by constant battles between her alcoholic mother and violent, controlling father.

Jeffs’s experiences in Melbourne mental hospitals from the 70s onwards, mostly harrowing but occasionally affirming, the stubborn viciousness of her inner voices, the sustaining support of her alternative family, and the world of literature and philosophy that feed her intellect and spirit all enrich this narrative. Entirely lacking in self-pity, this is a document imbued with the wisdom and clarity of a well-lived and nurturing life despite mental health that is at times precarious, with plenty of useful lessons for carers, professionals, policy makers and the general reader.

Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness by Michael Greenberg

Photograph: Marion Ettlinger

This is a poignant and beautifully written memoir about bipolar disorder from the perspective of fatherhood. Greenberg narrates the horror of watching his beloved daughter Sally switch suddenly into bipolar psychosis at the age of 15 and eke out a slow, shaky recovery in a no-frills Manhattan psychiatric hospital during a sweltering summer. It is meticulously and delicately written in a realist style that conveys the heaviness and various losses that result from watching a loved child disintegrate, as well as the financial stresses of living in New York, and of dealing with an inflexible, privatised health care system.

Greenberg describes madness as something that takes his daughter far away from him, and vividly conveys his fears that she will never return. The awkward encounters between his current and his ex-wife, the eccentricities of the other patients, as well as the burden he already bears of supporting a mentally ill brother, ground this memoir in a complex and challenging context.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness by Elyn Saks

Elyn Saks is a tenured professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Southern California with degrees from Oxford, Yale and Vanderbilt, and an expert in mental health law. She has also had the experience of being forcibly restrained for hours on end in psychiatric wards and forcefed medication while suffering acute psychosis. This memoir describes Saks’s struggle to accept and manage a diagnosis of schizophrenia, while forging a stellar academic career.

Saks first experienced full-blown psychosis as a young postgraduate on a philosophy scholarship at Oxford. In The Center Cannot Hold she documents her torturous journey towards accepting the severity of her illness and the need to take medication. During this period she was able to avail herself of skilled psychoanalysts who understood the emotional content of her delusions and enabled her to maintain some degree of equilibrium.

Saks gives important insights into her state of mind during her most acute episodes and how traumatised she was by the dehumanising treatment she experienced after suffering a breakdown at Yale. Key here are the human aspects of the illness – the way it is affected by stress, Saks’s struggles to maintain her academic career, and the shocking attitudes of psychiatric staff who valued compliance over healing. ‘While medication had kept me alive, it had been psychoanalysis that had helped me find a life worth living’, Saks asserts. The support and intellectual engagement that her career and her academic colleagues provide, her ultimate acceptance of the need for ongoing medication and her fulfilling marriage in her mid-forties together enable a life that is ‘rich and satisfying’.

Narratives of madness

These memoirs are riveting yet educational reads for the general public, as well as important guideposts for sufferers. But they are also vital documents for mental health practitioners, akin to qualitative research about the experiences of users of mental health services.

Three of them, Madness: A Bipolar Life, Madness: A Memoir and The Center Cannot Hold, contain a similar trajectory – after experiencing the extremes of the illness, sometimes worsened by addiction, the sufferer eventually comes to accept the need to take medication and to manage addictions and stresses, and learns how to maintain a balanced, fulfilling life. 

This trajectory suggests that if the right level of support and skill were offered early enough, sufferers might be able achieve recovery without the self-destruction and descent into addiction that are so commonly represented as necessary stages on the journey.

All five of them reflect on the human elements that make the long-term management of illness – and just as important a fulfilling life – possible.

In The Center Cannot Hold and Madness: A Memoir, what makes this journey possible is the loving, sustained attention of therapists who provide a safe psychic space in which the patient can explore emotional defences and gradually embrace maturity.

In Hornbacher’s case it is her ever-patient psychiatrist, the hospital she lives in for months on end, where staff are unendingly accepting and supportive, and the unconditional love and fortitude of her husband that together create a safety net in which she is harboured until the illness is tamed.

In Flying with Paper Wings, it is Jeffs’s ‘two Demeters’ – the female friends with whom she has lived in a peaceful setting on the rural fringes of Melbourne for 30 years.

In Hurry Down Sunshine, it is the sustained love and attention of Sally’s family, including the father–narrator, that eases Sally's transition to precarious sanity.

Creativity, purposeful work and strong friendships also play vital roles. Secure housing is vital and the fact that most of the stories feature middle class sufferers is no accident. Kate Richards expresses how lucky she is to be able to afford to choose her own therapist, and to buy a home that offers not just long-term security but a haven.

One of the reasons for the importance of these memoirs is their various critiques of the psychiatric profession and the mental health sector.

The memoir of Richards, a medical researcher, has not one decent psychiatrist throughout its 200-plus pages. Not one. They are helpful in dispensing medication, but the healing she receives comes from a psychologist. The implication is that the problem is systemic, due to faulty training – Richards is ‘sacked’ by one psychiatrist, while others demonstrate various levels of boredom and disengagement.

Sandy Jeffs also questions psychiatry, having left her long-term therapist, Dr Y, after 27 years. She is critical of what she calls ‘Fastpsychiatry’ and ponders the dangers and possibilities of investigating the psychic content of her delusions with a new therapist, Dr K, who is willing to explore with her the darkest underpinnings of her hostile voices: ‘If I could heal that little girl, would the persecutory content of my delusions and voices diminish, and allow me to embrace her?’

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