She’s written about spanking (she’s in favor) and depression (not). Which one has the bigger stigma? “Depression,” says Daphne Merkin, whose bold new and sometimes funny memoir, “This Close to Happy,” The New Yorker magazine called “a work of lacerating intelligence about a condition that intellect cannot heal.”
“People are afraid of depression, like if you give it too much space, you’ll be invaded by it,” she says. This child of Holocaust survivors was hospitalized three times but managed to publish, teach and raise a daughter. “Reading is one of my salvations in life,” the New Yorker told The Post from sunny California, where she’s thinking of moving. She said therapy helps, too.
Here’s what’s in her library:
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison
This is about the poet’s heroic battle with manic depression, which included a stunning number of hospitalizations, shock therapy and lithium, which helped him a lot. In his manic period, he was grandiose, delusional, destructive. But I envy mania, which has a positive side for creative people: I wouldn’t mind more of the free flow!
Love and Summer by William Trevor
This is a very subtle novel about a married man who briefly falls in love with someone while passing through a tiny town. She’s in a marriage that seems limited and in the end, the love affair is over. No one expects much, so you have to welcome the small pleasures. This is beautifully written and sad.
The Suspended Passions by Marguerite Duras
Duras had advanced, kinky views on love, sex, politics. Her most famous novel is “The Lover,” about a young girl involved with a much older, Asian man. It has a lot of erotic heat and made a good movie. In this book of interviews, she says love is the only discourse worth writing about, and that all men are homosexual.
Where Memory Leads by Saul Friedlander
Woody Allen and I share our Holocaust books: There’s even one about Hitler’s interior decorator, if you can believe it. This is a very moving memoir about the personal and psychological toll of the Holocaust. Friedlander’s parents died at Auschwitz; he was hidden in a Catholic school and was about to become a priest when he discovered he was Jewish.