By Michael Greenberg
Bloomsbury, £12.99
What purpose is there in madness?”, King David asked God. The same question lies at the heart of Hurry Down Sunshine, Michael Greenberg’s mesmerising account of the acute psychosis that suddenly engulfed his daughter, Sally, when she was 15 years old.
Within the space of a few days, she turned from normal teenager into crazed visionary, convinced she had been chosen to cure the suffering of humankind. Her father and stepmother listened to her ravings with helpless anguish, hoping she would calm down, but the mania got worse: “It is as if the real Sally has been kidnapped,” Greenberg writes, “and here in her place is a demon, like Solomon’s, who has appropriated her body.”
Sally is admitted to a psychiatric ward, heavily sedated and eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. One of her fellow inmates is a young Chasid, who pores over his Torah with “hollow intensity”. His family cling to the hope that he is not mad but, says the Chasid’s brother, “has achieved devaykah” (communion with God). “Tell your daughter to leave him alone.”
