Things That Helped

November 27, 2017
Australian writer Friedmann makes her debut with this uneven collection of essays cobbled together under the theme of postpartum depression, though few of them really explore this issue. Many of the selections instead dwell on Friedmann’s experiences in the years before her son’s birth or hold forth on social justice and psychological theory, only barely referencing her child or her illness, giving the impression less of an unconventional approach to memoir than of difficulty finding enough essays to fill a book. The strongest pieces, however, are also those that directly deal with motherhood and depression. “Maribyrnong” describes in powerful sensory detail the betrayals of the body and mind that postpartum depression can bring. “Red Lips,” the collection’s standout, and “Center Stage, Five Dances, and Other Dance On-Screen” lyrically narrate how a makeup ritual and bingeing on dance movies, respectively, helped Friedmann regain ownership of her body after a traumatic Caesarean section and the ensuing physical and mental pain. By comparison, her essays on artistic struggles, grief, white privilege, violence against women, and marital difficulties lack insight and urgency. Too often, Friedmann misses an opportunity to reveal the evolution of her love for her son—and herself.

February 15, 2018
A writer with a history of depression and anxiety plunges deeper into the abyss following the birth of her son.This memoir, structured as a series of interlinked essays, begins with Friedmann at a river, intending, at least in her mind, to drown herself; it ends with her return to a river, her son a little older, her mind a little clearer, and her attitude sunnier. "With the aid of medication and self-care, I was learning to forge new neural pathways," she writes. The rest of the book is devoted to other things that helped, including a strong, supportive marriage with a loving husband; the music of Antony and the Johnsons and then Anohni, the woman whom Antony has become; the feminist criticism of Siri Hustvedt and others; the inspiration Friedmann received from dance and the movies she watched repeatedly; and the recognition that she was not alone and that what she was experiencing had been experienced and survived by others, many of whom lacked the resources she enjoyed. When she is thinking more clearly, the author offers acute analysis, blurring distinctions that are too common and simple: "Illness and health, movement and inertia; they are not dialectically opposed, but constantly approaching and retreating from one another, overlaying each other, coexisting." Yet in the depths of her depression, the author felt that she had lost her grip on the lifeline of language, that motherhood has subsumed her, and that she would be incapable of resuming her roles as a writer and editor or balancing her own professional ambitions against her husband's. She never succumbs to sentimentality in these pages even when it's obvious how much she loves (or has learned to love) her son and how fortunate she feels for all that she has.Well-rendered essays that make readers think and feel deeply.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2018
Things That Helped may sound like the title of a self-help book, but a self-help book this is not. Rather, Friedmann's book is a quiet study of the things?pho, lipstick, weaving, and more?that helped her connect to the world as postpartum depression was breaking her down. She intertwines personal narrative with theory to build out a better understanding of her illness. For example, in a chapter on the music of Anohni, the transgender lead singer of the band Antony and the Johnsons, Friedmann writes also about Hippocrates, hysteria, and French feminism to make sense of her feelings of grief and the grotty parts of motherhood that nobody dares discuss. At one point she shamefully admits envy for women suffering from more familiar illnesses like anorexia and bulimia because they have been legitimated and recognized. By carefully and deliberately describing the pain, dissociation, discomfort, alienation, and other forms of havoc she experienced after birthing her son, Friedmann affirms and illuminates the physical, psychological, and political features of postpartum depression.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

February 28, 2017
Canberra-based writer Jessica Friedmann makes an impressive debut with her essay collection Things That Helped. Having lived with depression her entire life, Friedmann has learnt to find comfort in cherished ‘things’. Each essay focusses on a different thing that has helped, such as a ballet film, a song and a painting. Parallels can be drawn with Ruth Quibell’s essay collection The Promise of Things, which also wove memoir and critical theory into her history of ‘things’. Quibell’s book, however, stopped short of revealing too much about her psychological state while Friedmann is deeply intimate with her reader. In Friedmann’s essays, the personal is very much political. Friedmann views the world through a lens of intersectionality, and she has a sharp eye for how gender, race and class shapes the family unit. She cleverly weaves eco-feminist and psychoanalytic theory into her memoir without alienating readers who are unfamiliar with these fields. Her language is deeply visceral, and therefore hugely affecting, when describing the feeling of pregnancy, motherhood and mental illness. Like Fiona Wright in her memoir about hunger, Small Acts of Disappearance, Friedmann doesn’t offer a conventional recovery narrative, but by experimenting with language and melding personal story and theory, Friedmann’s book makes readers feel and think. Emily Laidlaw is a writer and editor