Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A studio executive leaves his family and travels the world giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he's been forced to hide for 20 years.
“You won’t be able to put down this exhilarating debut novel... brave and touching.”
—Marie Claire
In her tour-de-force first novel, Juliann Garey takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd—a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter for a decade to travel the world, giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he’s been forced to keep hidden for almost 20 years. The novel intricately weaves together three timelines: the story of Greyson’s travels (Rome, Israel, Santiago, Thailand, Uganda); the progressive unraveling of his own father seen through Greyson’s childhood eyes; and the intricacies and estrangements of his marriage. The entire narrative unfolds in the time it takes him undergo twelve 30-second electroshock treatments in a New York psychiatric ward.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Garey's debut novel, Greyson Todd is a high-flying movie executive who, in 1984, leaves his studio job and his wife and eight-year-old daughter, and embarks on a worldwide tour. Ten years later, he is in a New York hospital being treated for bipolar disorder which he has struggled with for decades and given electroshock treatment. In between, we get the story of Greyson's conflicted marriage to Ellen, and his childhood with a failure for a father. As he travels around the world, Greyson hops from Rome to the Negev, Bangkok, Santiago, and Uganda, but his adventures seldom rise above the level of travelogue. Only when he finally lands in New York, where he settles down in Chelsea, and the author details the steps leading up to Greyson's nervous breakdown, does the story become sufficiently dramatic. Otherwise, the achronological structure works against the narrative by not allowing the reader to chart the progress of Greyson's mental illness. The author's take on what it was like to be raised on the show business periphery of Beverly Hills in the late 1950s feels authentic. In the end, though, this earnest novel about depression breaks no new ground in its depiction of the subject.
