Rabbits for Food
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3.7 • 92 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
Master of razor-edged literary humor Binnie Kirshenbaum returns with her first novel in a decade, a devastating, laugh-out-loud funny story of a writer’s slide into depression and institutionalization.
It’s New Year’s Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum’s protagonist—an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer—fully unravels. Her breakdown lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital, where she refuses all modes of recommended treatment. Instead, she passes the time chronicling the lives of her fellow “lunatics” and writing a novel about what brought her there. Her story is a brilliant and brutally funny dive into the disordered mind of a woman who sees the world all too clearly.
Propelled by razor-sharp comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of—or into—the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief. A bravura literary performance from one of our most indispensable writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kirshenbaum's first novel in 10 years (The Scenic Route) a tour de force about 43-year-old novelist Bunny's descent into an abysmal clinical depression is a remarkable achievement that expertly blends pathos and humor. Readers meet the self-effacing Bunny in a psych ward, waiting for a therapy dog that never arrives. From there, the narrative backtracks to follow Bunny's trajectory from accomplished writer to being another one of the "lunatics." The death of her best friend tipped Bunny into her downward spiral, which bottoms out at a suffocating New Year's Eve dinner that goes very bad. Soon, she's checked in to a psych ward and under the care of doctors whose ideas about treatment diverge sharply from her own. There are hints of pending doom in flashbacks of Bunny's childhood: she felt out of place as the middle child in a middle-class home, and her outspoken (and generally caustic) observations were resented by her family. Amid the backstory and Bunny's razor-sharp scrutiny of living in a mental hospital, Kirshenbaum sprinkles in Bunny's brilliantly written and revelatory responses to the writing prompts given in the psych ward's creative writing class. Elsewhere, Bunny's cutting riffs on life in New York City, the psychiatrists she has seen throughout her life, and the effects of numerous medications, are eye-opening. Comparisons to One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest are obvious and warranted, but Kirshenbaum's dazzling novel stands on its own as a crushing work of immense heart.
Customer Reviews
Funny and profoundly sad
Told in a series of punchy fragments, like unmediated missives from the mind, or lightning strikes, this grim, amusing, and moving story of a caustic writer’s struggle with her mental health accumulates with increasing force as the broken pieces of this puzzle snap, snap, snap into place.
Not a happy take-to-the-beach read
My favorite part of the book was when it was done. I don’t mean to infer that it is poorly written or without merit: I will just advise anyone who allows their emotions to become embroiled in their reading to avoid getting caught up in this story. I’m now thoroughly depressed.