October Child
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From 2013 to 2017, Linda Boström Knausgård was periodically confined to a psychiatric ward and subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, resulting in the loss of memories. This is the story of her struggle against mental illness and isolation.
"(Boström Knausgård's) first openly autobiographical book becomes an act of self-examination powerful enough to match if not surpass those of her ex-husband’s."—The Guardian
From 2013 to 2017, Linda Boström Knausgård was periodically interned in a psychiatric ward where she was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. As the treatments at this “factory” progressed, the writer’s memories began to disappear. What good is a writer without her memory? This book, based on the author’s experiences, is an eloquent and profound attempt to hold on to the past, to create a story, to make sense, and to keep alive ties to family, friends, and even oneself. Moments from childhood, youth, marriage, parenting, and divorce flicker across the pages of October Child. This is the story of one woman’s struggle against mental illness and isolation. It is a raw testimony of how writing can preserve and heal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Swedish novelist Boström Knausgård (The Helios Disaster) brilliantly melds memoir and speculative nonfiction in her stirring account of the four years she spent in and out of a psychiatric ward. "I wish I could tell you all about the factory, but I can't... soon I'll no longer be able to remember my days or nights or why I was born," she writes, before describing the many electroconvulsive therapy procedures she underwent from 2013 to 2017 at a mental institution she was periodically committed to for severe depression. ("I had a weakness inside me and all throughout my being, so I ended up at this place a lot.") In dramatic juxtaposition, she pieces together dreamlike recollections of a childhood spent with a capricious actress-mother, and her adulthood, when she struggled with bipolar disorder and motherhood ("I frightened my children"), and married and divorced the novelist Karl Ove Knausgård. The loose narrative hauntingly evokes the uncertain haze and hallucinations she experienced during her repeated institutionalizations, before she was released at age 45 and reconnected with her four children. Part fever-dream, part quest to retrieve her memories ("because what good is a writer without her memory?"), Boström Knausgård's account expertly plumbs the treacherous crevasses of a creative mind.
