LOSING THE ATMOSPHERE

Manhattan-based librarian Conan grapples with complex mental disorders and misdiagnoses in this tumultuous memoir.

The author, who was born in 1942, writes that she grew up in Brooklyn with an elementary school teacher mother, an abusive father who worked at the post office,and a younger brother. Hers was an unhappy childhood, although she found some sense of normalcy in school and at Girl Scout camp. However, she felt a hole in her sense of self that developed into a “secret world” called “the Atmosphere”; it included an imaginary hospital with doctors that treated her illnesses, and imaginary companions such as the YellowSweaterLady and Jinx. She soon entered psychoanalysis but saw scant results until college in 1960, when she began to see a less formal analyst and began to make progress. Conan later worked as a substitute teacher and attended New York’s Pratt Institute; she also contemplated suicide, and she committed herself to a psychiatric ward for the first time in 1965. She found some peace working as a librarian at Pratt and earned a master’s degree in library science. But after further breakdowns and hospitalizations, she moved to a halfway house in the Bronx. She then met a therapist who helped identify her disorders, and another therapist who was the first who seemed to fully understand her—and upon whom she became increasingly dependent. Over the course of this lengthy memoir, Conan only minimally speaks about her feelings about her condition, which intensifies the book’s feeling of sustained detachment and unease. Instead, she conveys her state of mind to the reader through moments of eloquent narration: “If the floor had been sand, I would not have left footprints.” She also clearly shows how she was able to function in the real world, despite her overwhelming disorders, and she exhibits a sense of crystalline self-awareness throughout the text (“I felt myself slipping back into craziness”). Some readers may find this memoir to be overlong, but the exhilarating prose style effectively gets across the author’s touching and frenetic experiences.

A potent, heartfelt life story.