This Book Will Teach You About Empathy and Dealing With Depression
A book review discussing mental health
TW: Depression and Suicide
A Little Background
I treat books one of two ways. I pick them up, think this is lame, and put them right back down again; or I read the book and love it. Life is too short to read something you don’t like. Didn’t we all have enough of that in school?
As I’ve aged, my reading tastes have changed. I used to geek out over Fantasy and Sci-Fi, now I read more chick-lit than anything.
(Where, by the way, is the comparable genre for dudes?)
So, this is a Chick-Lit book and one that made a profound impact on me.
The Mystery of Mercy Close by Marian Keyes is the 5th of the Walsh Sister books, but trust me, you don’t need to read them in order, and in fact, you don’t even need to read the other books, but you should…
There’s a mystery in the book, a little plot to help things along, but I would argue the book isn’t much of a mystery. It’s much more about one woman and her attempt to deal with her depression, with a mystery tossed in to keep the plot moving.
You should buy this book, and you should read this book if you’re at all curious about what it’s like to deal with depression.
What Does the Publisher Say?
Helen Walsh doesn’t believe in fear — it’s just something men invented to get all the money — and yet she’s sinking. Her private investigator business has dried up, her flat has been repossessed, and now some old demons are resurfacing. Chief among them is her charming but dodgy ex-boyfriend Jay Parker, who offers Helen a lucrative missing-persons case. Wayne Diffney from boyband Laddz vanished from his house in Mercy Close — and the Laddz have a sellout comeback gig in five days.
Helen has a new boyfriend, but Jay’s reappearance proves unsettling. Playing by her own rules, Helen is drawn into a dark and glamorous world, where her own worst enemy is her own head and where increasingly the only person she feels connected to is Wayne, a man she has never even met.
Keyes, M. (2014). The Mystery of Mercy Close: A Novel. United States: Penguin Publishing Group.
My Thoughts
Notice how the publisher never mentions the word depression; after all, who wants to read a book with a depressed main character?
That certainly doesn’t sound like loads of fun or, frankly, very relaxing.
Yet, I highly recommend the book. Why? It shows the reader the reality of depression. It teaches us empathy.
This book rang so true to my own experiences with depression that I researched the author’s background, thinking that she had a history of depression. And it turns out she does.
A couple of quick points
There isn’t a depressed person on the face of God’s green earth that wants to remain a depressed person.
Depressed people struggle to find ways not to be depressed and labor even more to find the energy to implement solutions.
(I’ve been in therapy most of my life. One therapist actually told me I was in an impossible situation. I think she tried to shock me into redefining my issues, but all I heard was impossible.)
For me, depression ends one step, one day, one week at a time. There are no big solutions, no lightbulbs going off, it doesn’t happen by reading a book, and you certainly don’t wake up one day with it all in the past.
I do something healthy, and then I do it again, and I feel a little better, and gradually over time, I keep doing it until I wake up one day and notice the sun shining.
This moving book captures all of that. It’s reassuring to know you are not alone in your struggles.
Empathy does nothing if not making the world a better place.
