Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
A Novel
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Great Read: This novel about bipolar disorder and one man’s journey through the world is a “convincing portrait of mental illness” (Entertainment Weekly).
This tour-de-force novel 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 globe, finally giving free rein to the bipolar disorder he’s been forced to keep hidden for almost twenty years.
The story intricately weaves together three timelines—Greyson’s wanderings to Rome, to Israel, to Santiago, to Thailand, to Uganda; the progressive unraveling of his own father as seen through Greyson’s childhood memories; and the intricacies and estrangements of his marriage—all of which unfolds in a narrative spanning twelve thirty-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.
Customer Reviews
Gripping
Gosh…so much parallelism to parts of my own life. Really an emotional read-and very much worth it.