A MOUTHFUL OF AIR

First novel about a young woman’s struggle with postpartum depression.

The problem with stories about depression is that, even with happy endings, they are almost invariably as enervating as the disease itself. Julie Davis, our heroine, is a bright and sensitive New Yorker, happily married to Ethan (a successful lawyer) and the mother of a baby boy. Although Julie genuinely loves her son and husband, she sank into a terrible melancholy after giving birth and tried to kill herself. She slowly began to put her life in some order afterward with the help of Ethan and Dr. Edelman, a psychiatrist who was able to prescribe antidepressants. Naturally, Julie wondered how much of her problem was rooted in her past, and she began to consider the effect that her parents’ unhappy marriage and divorce had on her (as well as on her druggy brother David, a college dropout who now lives in the East Village). Just as Julie seemed on the verge of full recovery, however, she learned that she was pregnant again. This is good news and bad: Julie and Ethan both want another child, but it means that Julie will have to go off her meds until delivery. Will she be able to manage? She also has to adjust to life outside the city, since Ethan has bought a house in Long Island in anticipation of their new arrival. Anyone who has suffered from depression will recognize the distant, almost ethereal rhythm of Julie’s days—the constant rumination on the past, the lack of emotional response to the world around her, the sudden and inexplicable panics—but those who have not may find her story flat and largely uneventful.

A true and often moving portrait of someone in the grip of a terrible disease but, still, far too self-contained to succeed as a narrative.