In Love with Daylight - Hardcover

Sheed, Wilfrid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671792156 ISBN 13: 9780671792152

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1995

Synopsis

A three-time National Book Award nominee shares his experiences with childhood polio, depression, and an addictive personality from which he learned about the flaws in the medical system and the virtue of self-motivated recovery. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Stricken with polio as a kid. Floored by sedation-addiction (booze and pills) and depression in middle age. Blind-sided by cancer in his most recent years. Were you looking for a spokesperson for the JustiŽed Self-pity Foundation you would have to look no further than Wilfrid Sheed. But for this eminent novelist and essayist it has been the “primal insight” of his bouts with a brace of illnesses, each of which have caused him “to lose something I would have sworn I couldn’t live without,” that just being alive, “even on a no-frills basis, is astoundingly good.” And in the giddy rush of that realization there’s just no room for feeling sorry for oneself. Written in an inimitably rough-housing prose, Sheed’s uplifting memoir dramatically details the “bad night” that illness is, then puts its whole soul into celebrating waking from the night to fall “head over heels in love with daylight.”

From Library Journal:

Novelist Reynolds Price (A Whole New Life, LJ 3/1/94) battled spinal cancer; essayist Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face, LJ 7/94) struggled to restore her disfigured face; writer Gretel Ehrlich (A Match to the Heart, Pantheon, 1994) survived being struck by lightning; author Paul West (A Stroke of Genius, LJ 11/1/94) endured a string of illnesses. Critic Sheed (Essays in Disguise, LJ 3/1/90) joins his literary colleagues with this memoir of his recovery from childhood polio, depression caused by pill and alcohol addiction, and cancer. However, his rambling, tortuous musings lack the emotional power of the other works, and the reader often wishes Sheed would get to the point. Saying very little about his bouts with polio and cancer, Sheed focuses mostly on his effort to overcome his addictions; he has no kind words for psychiatrists, 12-step programs, and "Happy Valley" sanatoriums. Still, his saving grace is humor and optimism in the face of disaster. For larger collections.
-?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0671792156
• ISBN 13: 9780671792152
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256