Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1987
WEBSITE: http://jessicafriedmann.com/
CITY: Canberra
STATE: Australian Capital Territory
COUNTRY: Australia
NATIONALITY:
Married with one son.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017052746 |
| HEADING: | Friedmann, Jessica, 1987- |
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| 100 | 1_ |a Friedmann, Jessica, |d 1987- |
| 670 | __ |a Things that helped, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Jessica Friedmann) data view (6/1/1987) |
PERSONAL
Born 1987. Married; husband’s name Mike; children: Owen.
EDUCATION:Graduate of University of Melbourne.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and websites, including Rumpus, Lifted Brow, Smith Journal, Dumbo Feather, Voiceworks, Arts Hub, Newmatilda, Australian Financial Review, Age, and Luxury.
SIDELIGHTS
Jessica Friedmann describes her struggle with and recovery from postpartum depression in the memoir Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression. Friedmann had experienced depression at various times in her life, but after the birth of her son Owen, she plunged into unprecedented depths. She hated that her life was dominated by child care, and she was distressed by the physical effects of childbirth and breastfeeding. She seemed to have lost her facility with language and was afraid she could not go back to her career as a writer and editor. She had suicidal thoughts and homicidal ones as well. “We joke and laugh and demystify the grotty parts of motherhood,” she writes, “but we do not talk about these moments: when we dream of running our children under boiling taps or pinching their small noses closed; when the pitch of their constant crying leads us to vivid images of harm; when our rage bubbles over and the thoughts running through our minds are compulsive and unrelentingly terrifying.” She was able to recover through therapy, medication, the support of her husband, and a variety of interests, such as her love of art, the music of Antony and the Johnsons, and the ballet film Centre Stage, which she estimates she has viewed one hundred times. She deals with all these subjects in the essays that form the memoir, while also writing about feminist theory and her family relationships. A nonpracticing Jew, she is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.
Because of Friedmann’s history of depression, she had seen a psychiatrist during her pregnancy, but she was not really prepared for the severity of her postpartum depression, she told an interviewer at the Her Canberra website. “A previous experience of depression does raise the likelihood of experiencing [postnatal depression], so it was definitely something we talked about,” she said. “That said, I felt so gloriously healthy during my pregnancy that the possibility felt far off and abstract. I knew it was a risk, but I didn’t really ‘believe’ it.” She was initially reluctant to write about her postpartum depression, she continued, “because it was difficult and gruelling and ultimately quite boring. But the idea of ‘wasting’ that time really irked me. I think a lightbulb came on when I realised that I could use mental illness not as a narrative, but as a lens through which to examine all the things around me that excited or intrigued or frustrated or angered me.” She came to be glad she wrote the book, she told Sydney Morning Herald contributor Karen Hardy. “Being able to resuscitate those years and give them some sort of meaning and purpose has really put me at rest with the idea of what I went through,” she said. “When Owen was a very young baby, there was a lack of real connection, but now he’ll come in and snuggle with me in bed of a morning and we’ll really have a chat, he’ll invite me into his little games. It’s that connection, being involved in his dreams and stories. That’s what matters now.”
Several critics considered Things That Helped a thoughtful, unusual memoir. “Friedmann’s deeply personal story takes the reader on captivating digressions, from the intergenerational trauma of Holocaust survivors, to the latest cross-cultural research on postnatal depression,” observed Kara Nicholson on the Readings website. The author also “deftly weaves in popular culture references,” Nicholson noted. The book, related Grace McCarter in the Hot Chicks with Big Brains digital edition, is “anything but a conventional recovery narrative. It was a challenge for me, but also an immeasurable relief.” Friedmann, she continued, “has a way of weaving the various elements of her subject matter … so tightly and artfully together that you almost can’t see how they ever would have existed on their own.” Nicholas Reid, writing online at Stuff, expressed a similar opinion. “Things That Helped is definitely not a self-help manual.” he wrote. “It is a set of twelve detailed and sophisticated essays in which Friedmann considers all the things that helped her rebuild a sense of identity and confidence.” He found it a bit off-putting when Friedmann delved into what he called “Feminism 101” and when she discussed her frequent travels and other experiences that marked her as privileged. He allowed, however, that “the sanity of Friedmann’s approach overrides these moments” and pointed out that “she addresses this very issue of privilege and her guilt about it.”
A Publishers Weekly contributor was not so enthusiastic about Friedmann’s wide-ranging subject matter, saying it ends up “giving less of an unconventional approach to memoir than of difficulty finding enough essays to fill a book.” The reviewer deemed Things That Helped “uneven.” Still others offered strong praise. On the Books and Publishing Web site, Emily Laidlaw reported that “by experimenting with language and melding personal story and theory, Friedmann’s book makes readers feel and think.” In Booklist, Maggie Taft commended Friedmann’s work as “a quiet study of the things … that helped her connect to the world as postpartum depression was breaking her down.” A Kirkus Reviews critic summed up the contents as “well-rendered essays that make readers think and feel deeply.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Friedmann, Jessica, Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression (memoir), Scribe (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY).
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Maggie Taft, review of Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression, p. 12.
Guardian (London, England), May 16, 2017, Bridie Jabour, “Jessica Friedmann: ‘I Was Opening a Door into a World I Always Knew Was There.'”
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of Things That Helped.
Publishers Weekly, November 27, 2017, review of Things That Helped, p. 48.
Saturday Paper, March 25, 2017, “Writer Jessica Friedmann on Postnatal Depression and Motherhood.”
Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), June 30, 2017, Karen Hardy, Jessica Friedmann: Things That Helped My Postpartum Depression.”
ONLINE
Books and Publishing Web site, https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/ (March 29, 2017), Emily Laidlaw, review of Things That Helped.
Her Canberra, http://hercanberra.com.au/ (April 18, 2017), “Raw and Honest: Jessica Friedmann’s Things That Helped.“
Hot Chicks with Big Brains Online, http://hotchickswithbigbrains.com/ (April 24, 2017), Grace McCarter, review of Things That Helped.
Jessica Friedmann Website, http://jessicafriedmann.com (May 22, 2018).
Readings Website, https://www.readings.com.au/ (May 22, 2018), Kara Nicholson, review of Things That Helped.
Stuff, https://www.stuff.co.nz/ (July 16, 2017), Nicholas Reid, review of Things That Helped.
I'm a writer and editor living in Canberra, ACT, with my husband and small son. My floors are increasingly overrun by toy trains, and my bookshelves are increasingly overtaken by Agatha Christie novels.
I graduated from the University of Melbourne in 2010 with an Honours Thesis in Creative Writing, for which I won a R.G. Wilson Scholarship.
As an editor, I have worked across student paper Farrago and indie titles Going Down Swinging, a cloth-covered button, and Dumbo Feather, with a stint at the Lonely Planet.
My writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Lifted Brow, Smith Journal, Dumbo Feather, Voiceworks, Arts Hub, newmatilda, Australian Financial Review, The Age, Luxury, and more.
My debut book of essays, Things That Helped, is out now with Scribe. Based on my experience of extreme and debilitating postpartum depression, the essays each take as object at their centre, and examine how imbued or embodied narratives can help when navigating your way through and out of illness.
For any queries, please get touch at jess . friedmann @ gmail . com, or contact my agent, Grace Heifetz, at Curtis Brown.
Quoted in Sidelights: “well-rendered essays that make readers think and feel deeply.”
Friedmann, Jessica: THINGS THAT HELPED
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Friedmann, Jessica THINGS THAT HELPED Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $16.00 4, 10 ISBN: 978-0-374-27480-1
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.
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Friedmann, Jessica: THINGS THAT HELPED." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247916/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ba5ea942. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527247916
2 of 4 4/21/18, 2:03 AM
Quoted in Sidelights: “a quiet study of the things … that helped her connect to the world as postpartum depression was breaking her down.”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Things That Helped: On Postpartum
Depression
Maggie Taft
Booklist.
114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p12. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression. By Jessica Friedmann. Apr. 2018. 280p. Farrar, paper, $16 (97803742748011. 618.7.
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.--Maggie Taft
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Taft, Maggie. "Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 12.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250772 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=9685ae2b. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250772
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Quoted in Sidelights: “giving less of an unconventional approach to memoir than of difficulty finding enough essays to fill a book.” “uneven.”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression
Publishers Weekly.
264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p48. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression Jessica Friedmann. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-0-374-27480-1
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. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 48. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575683/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=2e387ee7. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575683
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Quoted in Sidelights: “Friedmann’s deeply personal story takes the reader on captivating digressions, from the intergenerational trauma of Holocaust survivors, to the latest cross-cultural research on postnatal depression,” observed Kara Nicholson at the Readings Web site. The author also “deftly weaves in popular culture references,”
Things That Helped by Jessica Friedmann
Reviewed by Kara Nicholson
28 Mar 2017
Last year I was challenged by Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a book its publisher categorised as ‘autotheory’, a kind of hybrid of autobiography and critical theory. Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (which I read when it was republished last year) could also fit this category, though Kraus herself considers her work to be fiction despite the fact that everything that happened in the book ‘happened first in life’. I think I would also place Jessica Friedmann’s collection within this ‘genre-bending’ category.
In this collection of candid essays, Friedmann weaves thinking from the likes of Lacan, Kristeva and Cixous into her own lived experience of postnatal depression, to more broadly consider the onerous challenges of being female, a writer and a mother. While Things That Helped does not push at the boundaries to the same degree as the writings of Nelson and Kraus, it is more accessible in its structure. Friedmann’s deeply personal story takes the reader on captivating digressions, from the intergenerational trauma of Holocaust survivors, to the latest cross-cultural research on postnatal depression. She deftly weaves in popular culture references from Antony and the Johnsons lyrics to her anxiety-induced obsession with the American teen movie Centre Stage. She is careful not to try and speak for all women and I strongly admire her determination to make it her ‘life’s work to bear witness’ to the suffering of other women who have been similarly rocked when their bodies and minds seem to turn against them, or whose stories do not conform to the typical narratives of motherhood.
Autotheoretical literature is an exciting genre and I hope to see more works like Friedmann’s collection reach a mainstream audience in the future.
Kara Nicholson works as a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “Things That Helped is definitely not a self-help manual.” he wrote. “It is a set of 12 detailed and sophisticated essays in which Friedmann considers all the things that helped her rebuild a sense of identity and confidence.” He found it a bit off-putting when Friedmann delved into what he called “Feminism 101” and when she discussed her frequent travels and other experiences that marked her as privileged. He allowed, however, that “the sanity of Friedmann’s approach overrides these moments” and pointed out that “she addresses this very issue of privilege and her guilt about it.”
Book review: Things that helped by Jessica Friedmann - a memoir of postnatal depression
Author Jessica Friedmann
SUPPLIED
Author Jessica Friedmann
THINGS THAT HELPED
by Jessica Friedmann
(Scribe, $34)
There's a school of thought that says men should not review women's books about specifically female issues.
Obviously I don't agree with this line. What's the purpose of a nonfiction book if not to enlighten people about something? And surely men need to be enlightened about how women think and feel.So here I am reviewing a book which is very much about a women's issue.
Things That Helped is a memoir of postpartum depression – the severe depression that many mothers feel after having given birth.
Canberra-based now, but for most of her life a Melburnian, Jessica Friedmann had a history of mild depression. But she was not prepared for the tsunami of anxiety that overcame her when she gave birth to her son Owen. She makes it clear that her husband Mike was, and is, very supportive and did his best to make her first-time motherhood easier. Even so, she felt the extreme nature of the physical changes in her body, especially as she had had a caesarean section to avoid a breech birth.
There are the chafed nipples and weariness of lost sleep as she has to feed her baby by day and by night. There are the impulsive trains of thought and obsessions. There's a loss of intellectual focus and an irrational sense of guilt.
READ MORE
* Christchurch mum's struggle for help with postnatal depression
* Chrissy Teigen opens up about postpartum depression in moving personal essay
* One mum opens up: 'I know the agony of postnatal depression'
Sometimes, she says, she felt either homicidal or suicidal. On top of this, there are the new limits to her movements and social life, as a newborn baby has to be nurtured. Loneliness and a sense of isolation well up. So how does she deal with all this?
Things That Helped is definitely not a self-help manual. It is a set of 12 detailed and sophisticated essays in which Friedmann considers all the things that helped her rebuild a sense of identity and confidence. Sure, anti-depressant drugs and psychotherapy were part of it. She does not denigrate conventional medicine.
However, she is more concerned to use her psychological crisis to reconsider her life. Her love of weaving and of art helps. Although she's a little shy about it, chilling out and watching ballet movies helps. She is particularly helped by analysing how she feels about her family and her upbringing. There is an essay on her formidable grandmother and another on the father whom she loves, but whose opinions grate on her. It is not an easy journey but by the end of the last essay. she leaves the impression that she is now coping and moving on.
I admit there were moments in this book that alienated me. Friedmann's casual references to gallery-openings attended and foreign trips taken suggest somebody very comfortably in the upper-middle-classes and used to a few privileges. Not your ordinary battling mum. But then in a late chapter, she addresses this very issue of privilege and her guilt about it. As for the lapses into Lacanian psychology and talk of women as mythic sorceresses, witches and disruptors – it's very Feminism 101.
But the sanity of Friedmann's approach overrides these moments. And her writing is both persuasive and ornate.
- Stuff
Quoted in Sidelights: “A previous experience of depression does raise the likelihood of experiencing [postnatal depression’, so it was definitely something we talked about,” she said. “That said, I felt so gloriously healthy during my pregnancy that the possibility felt far off and abstract. I knew it was a risk, but I didn’t really ‘believe’ it.”“because it was difficult and gruelling and ultimately quite boring. But the idea of ‘wasting’ that time really irked me. I think a lightbulb came on when I realised that I could use mental illness not as a narrative, but as a lens through which to examine all the things around me that excited or intrigued or frustrated or angered me.”
Raw and honest: Jessica Friedmann’s Things That Helped
HerCanberra Team
Things That Helped is a raw and honest look at Jessica Friedmann’s descent into postnatal depression (PND) – and importantly, her recovery.
Pulling apart ‘the things that helped’ her chart a course to wellness, we read the very personal against a backdrop of pop culture and critical theory to look at some of the issues small and large around mental illness, creativity, race end gender. Confronting and moving, Things That Helped speaks to our experiences as women and mothers, and brings us together in an affirmation of friendship, family and art that is full of love and hope.
While pregnant did you think about the possibility of PND at all?
I did and I didn’t. Because I had experienced severe depression in my teens and early twenties, I was assigned a psychiatrist at the hospital I was going to give birth at, and I checked in with her as the pregnancy progressed. We talked about coping strategies and the way my priorities would be changed and challenged after giving birth.
A previous experience of depression does raise the likelihood of experiencing PND, so it was definitely something we talked about. That said, I felt so gloriously healthy during my pregnancy that the possibility felt far off and abstract. I knew it was a risk, but I didn’t really ‘believe’ it.
Jessica Friedmann
Jessica Friedmann
Your book has some shocking statistics about the prevalence of PND, maternal suicide and the real lack of intensive help. Were you at all aware of these things before you became unwell – or better?
Unfortunately, I have had a few close friends go through psychiatric throughout our twenties, and I’ve seen the utter lack of systemic support they’ve received as they’ve tried to battle towards better health, so the issue has always been on my radar. The public system is so broken that it actually scared me into buying private health insurance, should I need to be hospitalised for depression, but even that isn’t fail-safe; I’ve sat with a friend on suicide watch when she was given a 72-hour wait time to get on a private ward.
I’ve dropped my insurance now as it was causing too much financial strain, and I have a strong self-care plan and strategies in place for if my medication plateaus or life stresses become overwhelming. You learn pretty quickly to take care of yourself when you’re chronically ill, as the support just isn’t there. Advocating for yourself is another thing entirely. The system, including Centrelink, is set up to be baffling and make you feel ashamed for seeking help. It’s very easy to allow yourself to be turned away.
Your book centres around objects, experiences and considerations that helped get you through – can you give us a couple of examples of what they were and how they helped?
The one a lot of people seem to relate to is dance movies and the experience of watching them when you’re feeling ill or sad or vulnerable. There’s something magical about them! I must have watched Center Stage a hundred time by now, and the thrill of watching that final dance sequence never wears thin. Writing about the film was really fun.
I also had a ritual of eating pho in my early pregnancy. It was the only thing I could keep down, but it also reminded me of my grandmother’s chicken soup, which is such a big component part of my Jewish heritage; her own links to Footscray, where I lived, and to the idea of being nurtured. Just little things like that, that turned into larger stories.
One of the unnerving things about your experience was, as a writer, losing your grip on words during this time. Can you tell us about that and then how you came back to words- was the writing intended to be therapeutic or just a natural thing fo you as a writer to do?
I never think of writing as being therapeutic — it’s too difficult! But writing the book did complement the pretty intensive therapy I was in at the time. I would talk to my therapist and then go away and grapple with things on the page, and become aware of gaps or of unconscious omissions.
Losing my faculty with language was really scary and it’s why, I think, I’ve placed so much importance on other art forms in the book. Dance, painting, tapestry; they can all hold so much meaning that doesn’t depend on the verbal. Rediscovering these forms has been lifesaving.
thinsgthathelped
And did you intend to write for publication or have any inkling your essays could be a book?
I was initially really resistant to writing about this period in my life, because it was difficult and gruelling and ultimately quite boring. But the idea of “wasting” that time really irked me. I think a lightbulb came on when I realised that I could use mental illness not as a narrative, but as a lens through which to examine all the things around me that excited or intrigued or frustrated or angered me. We really venerate a neurotypical voice in literature. I wanted to do something that unsettled that a little.
How have people you know responded to the book – or the full weight of knowing what you have been through?
The response has been really lovely. I’ve had old friends get in touch, acquaintances, even strangers, to let me know how much aspects of the book have meant to them, or even just that I’m talking about postpartum mental illness at all. It’s still cloaked in such silence, even though it’s a more common experience than breast cancer. It will touch more families, be just as devastating. But we’re still supposed to deal with it in private.
My family and closest friends knew what was happening at the time, and were incredibly supportive. I’m lucky in that nobody in my close circle sees a psychiatric illness as being less legitimate as a physical one, which should go without saying, but doesn’t, always. I did worry about the reaction of those friends I didn’t tell, and wrote about it to try to explain why. I worried that they would feel that I didn’t trust them enough to feel comfortable confiding in them. But that’s turned out to be unfounded, and the best thing I’ve done with the book coming out is to try to stop managing the feelings of others, or anticipating their responses. If people are struggling with that weight, we can talk about it. The experience has been collaborative, communal, which in a way is a relief.
Any book recommendations – on this or other topics? What’s on your TBR pile?
My to-read pile is a teetering mountain at the moment! There’s so much contemporary writing I’ve been dying to dive into, but haven’t had time for while I was writing the book. I’m really looking forward to Durga Chew-Bose’s collection, Too Much and Not The Mood, as well as Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things — it’s been on my bedside table for a month. Sarah Schmidt’s See What I Have Done looks incredible, and because I have keenly watched its progression in a series of Facebook statuses, Mel Campbell’s romantic comedy, The Hot Guy is on my list.
In terms of writing on depression, I can’t recommend Dana Jack’s Silencing The Self highly enough. It’s a quarter of a century old, so there are aspects that read as outdated, and her cohort is, unfortunately, narrow, but by and large, it’s predicted a phenomenal volume of qualitative research into women’s depression, and done so accurately. It’s the kind of book I read when I need a kick of feminist context for the experience of depression; that it’s influenced greatly by our culture and surroundings, and not simply isolated within the individual. I love Jack for simply and plainly demonstrating that, and for placing mental illness within a disability politics that is strident and radical in its need for social change.
Jessica Friedmann is running a life writing/memoir workshop, Writing Life, Writing Self, on Sunday 8 October, 2-5pm, at Muse Canberra. For more info and bookings visit the Feminist Writers Festival website.
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Sometimes a story is bigger than one person...that's when the HerCanberra Team puts its collective head together to come up with the goods. Enjoy! More about the Author
Quoted in Sidelights: “anything but a conventional recovery narrative. It was a challenge for me, but also an immeasurable relief.” Friedmann, she continued, “has a way of weaving the various elements of her subject matter … so tightly and artfully together that you almost can’t see how they ever would have existed on their own.”
Books for Big Brains: Jessica Friedman’s Things That Helped
April 24, 2017
written by Anna Apuli
Every so often the Big Brains Boss, Bri Lee, is sent a new book that’s written by, or about, women. We’ve decided to take advantage of this by publishing short, succinct reviews that give you the lowdown on the quality content found within each book’s pages. These reviews will form part of an ongoing series: Books for Big Brains.
How could it get any better, you ask? Well, we want to send YOU the books for FREE. If you’d like to be among the first to get your hands on the latest publications, all you have to do is provide us with your opinion on the book you’re sent in the form of a 200-300 word review. Sound like a sweet deal? Get in touch with us!
This review of Jessica Friedman’s Things That Helped is brought to you by beautiful and brilliant Issue #2 contributor, Grace McCarter. Issue #2 is now SOLD OUT, but if you missed the chance to nab yourself a copy, you can read Grace’s gorgeous piece written especially for our blog in the lead-up to the launch here. Want to avoid missing out next time? Pre-order a copy of Hot Chicks with Big Brains Issue #3!
“The baby whacks my kidneys with impatience when I sit at the table at night, trying in vain to capture the spontaneity and basic firmness of those first clear lines. Why bother, the kicks seemed to say, why bother to make anything but me.”
The amount of good books in the world waiting to be read can be overwhelming, and choosing which one is next can feel like a formidable task in the face of that. Sometimes, to be honest, I decide what to read based on what I’m ready to hear.
Jessica Friedman’s feminist, autotheoretical text, Things That Helped (Scribe, 2017) is anything but a conventional recovery narrative. It was a challenge for me, but also an immeasurable relief.
This is a book you want to read in bits over a week or two – one to close at the end of each part so that the essay can roll around in the back of your mind and unfurl steadily in the heat of your thoughts like a bundled chrysanthemum tea flower.
Friedman’s experiences of postpartum depression bind together what Kara Nicholson has perfectly described as ‘a series of captivating digressions’. Each essay takes a topic as its heart: intergenerational trauma, ballet, and critical theory, to name just a few. At times, it feels like Friedman is talking about everything in the book at once; she has a way of weaving the various elements of her subject matter (which, incidentally, include weaving too) so tightly and artfully together that you almost can’t see how they ever would have existed on their own.
I haven’t read a collection of essays that has affected me so since Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things To Me (Haymarket Books, 2014). While I’d recommend this book to almost anyone, I’d particularly recommend it to those who, like me, jumped on the Solnit train and are looking for some more discerning and beautifully executed feminist criticism to get excited about — not that there’s any shortage. It’s incredible to read Friedman engaging with so many voices without having them, even for a minute, drown out her own.
Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆
RRP: $29.99 (available from Scribe Publications and Avid Reader among others)
Want to review a book for us as part of Books for Big Brains? Get in touch with us by emailing Emma Kate Lewis at emma@hotchickwithbigbrains.com.
Words and Image by Grace McCarter
Intro and Edits by Emma Kate Lewis
Books for Big Brains, feminism, feminist, Grace McCarter, hcwbb, Hot Chicks with Big Brains, hotchickswithbigbrains, Jessica Friedman, motherhood, nonfiction, review, Things That Helped, woman, women, writer
Quoted in Sidelights: “by experimenting with language and melding personal story and theory, Friedmann’s book makes readers feel and think.”
Things That Helped (Jessica Friedmann, Scribe)
28 February 2017 Unlocked content from the archive.
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
Category: Reviews
Jessica Friedmann: 'I was opening a door into a world I always knew was there'
In our series Beauty and the books, we chat to those who love both books and beauty products. Here author Jessica Friedmann talks about vitamin B serum, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and her hunt for a new red lipstick
Bridie Jabour
Interview by Bridie Jabour
@bkjabour
Tue 16 May 2017 22.41 EDT
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.15 EST
Australian writer Jessica Friedmann
Australian writer Jessica Friedmann: ‘I felt more 13 at the age of 24 than I felt at 13 [because of my skin]’. Photograph: Heather Lighton/Scribe/Heather Lighton
Jessica Friedmann’s recent collection of essays Things That Helped centred on her postpartum depression but she has recently discovered the healing qualities of good birth control, antidepressants and skincare. That and the power of a contemplative novel.
What’s thrilling?
In the last year I’ve been using a vitamin B serum and it’s completely healed my skin. When I went off the pill to get pregnant, my skin went bonkers, it was so hormonal and broken and dry. Then I moved to Canberra, where the air is so harsh, and we had such a high altitude. I walked into a salon one day, kind of falling apart, and this lovely woman gave me a bottle of Asap Super B Complex. It’s the only thing I’ve ever used that’s made my skin feel replenished. I was having a lot of breakouts before and they were incredibly painful and now I don’t worry about it. I put a layer on before bed and I’ve stopped obsessing about my skin and have lots of energy to devote elsewhere.
Postnatal depression is not a new phenomenon, only a chronically ignored one
Jessica Friedmann
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I feel really lucky that I have finally figured out good birth control, I’ve got my antidepressants on the right dose, and the third magic ingredient seems to be skincare. I felt more 13 at the age of 24 than I felt at 13 [because of my skin]. It was horrible and unexpected as an adult.
The books that I’m sentimental about are the ones that I have read at quite formative times
I just bought Known and Strange Things, by Teju Cole. He’s a fascinating writer and these are beautiful impressionistic [essays about] aspects of life he’s been interested in, people, landscapes, technology, food It’s kind of fragmentary, it’s almost prose poetry in how beautiful it is but it’s also intellectually engaged. I love to have a book I can dip into and grapple with for a few pages and come out feeling refreshed.
Jordan Raskopoulos: 'Playing Warhammer prepared me for makeup'
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What I keep going back to
My mother has been giving me a bottle of Aesop Resurrection Aromatique hand wash ($40) for Christmas for a while now. We live in different states so I’ve really loved my bottle of Aesop. The smell is a lovely connection to her but I also feel quite sentimental about it because it’s become my son’s personal scent alongside milk and dirt and Vegemite. I send him off to wash up and he lathers the Aesop and comes back smelling like a rosemary leaf.
I’ve been reading Lucy Maud Montgomery’s diaries which has been a lovely insight into her work [such as Anne of Green Gables], which as a child I loved. [Generally] the books that I’m sentimental about are the ones that I have read at formative times. Roland Barthes’ Mythologies is a book I feel quite sentimental towards. Intellectually I’m able to critique it now in a way that I couldn’t when I was 17, but when I first picked it up I felt like I was opening a door into a world that I always knew was there but couldn’t find a way into. I think a little bit of that magic remains every time I read it.
I was 13 or 14 when I read Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, it was a set text at school and I absolutely fell in love with the narrator, Ruth. She felt so real to me and the conflicts in the book, the conflicts of sisterhood and aunthood and grappling with the domestic, just felt very present.
What’s nostalgia-inducing?
Yassmin Abdel-Magied: 'Most people doing my makeup would make me look white'
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I’ve been wearing red lipstick for 10 years, [but] I’ve been having a crisis of conscience. My old faithful is Lady Danger from MAC ($36), which to me is the gold standard in red lipstick. MAC has moved into the Chinese market in the past few years so they now do animal testing, which is a requirement of the Chinese government for beauty products and cosmetics. So I’ve been trying to find a lipstick that is as good as Lady Danger. Sportsgirl makes a nice one that’s cruelty free, called Almost Famous ($9.95) but I am holding on to my tube of Lady Danger with both hands, wearing it down to a stub because I don’t think anything is quite as good as it is.
MAC do great work with their HIV funds and that’s probably a good enough reason to buy the lipstick but I feel animal testing is one of those things I can never really get around if it’s for a really frivolous, ridiculous purpose such as a lipstick. It’s not about vaccines, so if any readers have any tips about a Lady Danger-esque lipstick that’s cruelty free, I’d love to hear them.
I’ve read In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden maybe a dozen times, it’s so dense with beauty. It’s about a woman who becomes a nun and the entire cast of characters is almost entirely from within the monastery. It’s a very quiet, contemplative book that looks at what it means to be in a community of women and to turn your attention towards trying to find a flavour of grace within your personality, trying to eradicate from within yourself the things that you know to be petty or jealous or conniving while at the same time humbling yourself before God and realising that you’re still human.
Animal testing is one of those things I can never really get around
It goes very sweetly and beautifully into the relationships of the nuns to one another; still being people and personalities, and how they grapple with and love one another and are in competition within this cloistered environment.
It’s a book I find extraordinarily rich and alive. I’ve always loved Rumer Godden as a writer. She seems to have fallen out of favour, she’s not as venerated as a lot of British writers of her time now but she’s quite brilliant and she has this clear eye and enormous compassion. I think this is her master work.
Jessica Friedmann will appear on a series of panels at Sydney writers’ festival
Writer Jessica Friedmann on postnatal depression and motherhood
Jessica Friedmann
Credit: Heather Lighton
Several months into the sleepless fog of new motherhood, Jessica Friedmann took to lying on her bathroom floor between night-time feeds. Cooling her back against the icy tiles, she began to dream of walking out of her Footscray house, across the highway, down the steep hill that led to the Maribyrnong River, and drowning herself.
“Some timely intervention may have saved me a lot of struggle,” she tells me. In hindsight, the symptoms of postnatal depression are easily recognisable – the exhaustion, the total lack of interest in food, the lack of affection for her infant son, the suicidal thoughts. At the time, despite previous struggles with mental illness, Friedmann lacked objective insight into her condition. This is what having a baby is like, she rationalised to herself. Other women do it, so I’m going to do it, too – I’m going to tough it out.
Friedmann, 30, is sharp but gently spoken. Soft curls frame dark features and lipstick, vermilion when we speak, which she has worn daily for so long she can’t remember when the habit became ritual. She has the lithe lines of a dancer – ballet was a childhood hobby and is an ongoing passion. She has built a career with words, as a freelance writer and editor for Dumbo Feather magazine and the literary journal Going Down Swinging.
Friedmann’s postnatal depression, also known as postpartum depression or PPD, is the subject of her debut book, Things That Helped, which collects interrelated essays on motherhood, art, ethnicity and family. “I think postnatal depression is often perceived publicly as just a period of intense sadness,” Friedmann says. “I don’t think many people who don’t experience mental illness firsthand are aware of how severe, and how surprising and incapacitating, the symptoms can be.”
An estimated one in seven Australian women experience PPD, distinct from the “baby blues”, a common and transient period of emotional disturbance caused by the withdrawal of pregnancy hormones after childbirth. Public awareness has grown substantially in the past several years, driven in part by high-profile disclosures. Last year, BuzzFeed ran a listicle naming Drew Barrymore, Elle Macpherson and Hayden Panettiere among “17 Celebrities Who Have Spoken Up About Their Postnatal Depression”. Recently, American model Chrissy Teigen penned a personal essay for Glamour magazine in which she wrote frankly about social isolation, anhedonia and hospital trips for overwhelming physical pain.
“Being in charge of another life, at a time when you may not value your own life very much, puts you and your baby in a very, very fraught and scary position.”
Although PPD has achieved greater public recognition, the expected strength of the maternal bond can have a stigmatising effect on mothers who are unable to feel affection for their child. It’s a major barrier to mental health treatment: research from beyondblue has found that feelings of failure and the fear of being perceived as a bad mother delays women from seeking help. “The popular narrative seems to be that shame keeps us quiet about our illnesses, our vulnerabilities,” Friedmann writes in her book, “but where there might be shame there is also a very real and pressing threat of danger.”
Perceptions of PPD are necessarily influenced by the way in which parenthood is publicly represented, which Friedmann believes has become more polarised in the past decade. On the one hand, there’s the “deliriously happy” camp. Friedmann rattles off the emblems: “Instagram photos, all-natural cotton wraps, we’re feeding from the breast for 24 months, we’re enrolling our children in Montessori school, I’ve always wanted to be a mother, look at me baking my banana bread.” None is necessarily bad, but together paint a glowing – and often unrealistic – portrait of what maternity should be.
The counterpoint – which Friedmann finds too cynical – is representations that focus on the unglamorous, hair-rending frustrations of child-raising. She cites Shit on My Hands: A Down and Dirty Guide to Early Parenthood and Reasons My Kid Is Crying. The latter book originated as a Tumblr blog, on which the author Greg Pembroke posted photos of his toddlers accompanied by explanatory captions – gems include “I wouldn’t let him eat Buzz Lightyear’s head”, “He dumped a full cup of water on his own face” and “We wouldn’t let him splash in the toilet”. It swiftly went viral.
Friedmann believes that greater nuance in the public discussion of parenting is warranted – “to acknowledge that it’s ecstatically, deliriously poignant and beautiful and happy a lot of the time, at the same time as being gruelling and awful”.
“We joke and laugh and demystify the grotty parts of motherhood,” she writes in her book, “but we do not talk about these moments: when we dream of running our children under boiling taps or pinching their small noses closed; when the pitch of their constant crying leads us to vivid images of harm; when our rage bubbles over and the thoughts running through our minds are compulsive and unrelentingly terrifying.”
Shocking as they may seem, thoughts of harming one’s child are not rare. One general population study of mothers of colicky babies – albeit with a small sample size – found that 70 per cent had aggressive thoughts and fantasies towards their infants, and 26 per cent admitted to having infanticidal thoughts during episodes of colic. In another study, of mothers to children under three, 41 per cent of depressed participants admitted to having thoughts of harming their child.
“It astounds me that we don’t have a real and established system for making sure that [babies] are not in the care of parents who may be incapacitated,” Friedmann tells me. “Being in charge of another life, at a time when you may not value your own life very much, puts you and your baby in a very, very fraught and scary position.”
For Friedmann, PPD was an isolating experience. A diagnosis of depression is often conflated with a total, unwavering absence of pleasure: how do you explain private suffering to someone who has seen you laugh, be lively or appear content? “There are little high points of joy that you can find within the disease, but they take it out of you,” Friedmann says. She only began to confide in friends when a prescription for escitalopram, an antidepressant, began to lift the fog. She was prescribed the drug when she returned to hospital for a scheduled follow-up – a complicated Caesarean section had led to multiple uterine infections. By that time, Friedmann’s mental health had deteriorated severely, to the point that she was barely speaking, and constantly thinking about the Maribyrnong River.
As her PPD worsened, Friedmann’s language ability deteriorated. She found herself unable to concentrate enough to read or write. The loss became the genesis for Things That Helped. “I realised how dangerous it was for me to have so much of my identity bound up in one thing,” Friedmann says. She immersed herself in other creative spheres – dance, visual art, the music of Anohni, making textiles – that aren’t “contingent on finding the right words or forming an intellectual argument”.
On these subjects, Friedmann now writes with a fan’s fervour and the shrewd eye of a critic. She relishes art in all forms: she deconstructs Center Stage, the 2000 film about aspiring ballerinas; is captivated by Amrita Sher-Gil, a painter often referred to as India’s Frida Kahlo; and, having learnt how to weave, can discern by touch the difference between alpaca and merino wool.
Friedmann becomes impassioned when I bring up the underfunding of arts organisations and workers. “It pisses me off when politicians try to frame [art] as something that is only accessible to or of interest to ‘elites’,” Friedmann says. “Everyone reads books, or newspapers or magazines; everyone listens to music. Most people go to the movies; most people tell their children bedtime stories or go dancing on Saturday night. This idea that the arts is something rarefied and refined is just so fucking bogus.”
Friedmann was a precocious student: as a youngster, having read the books on offer in her primary school library, she was granted special permission to borrow books from the senior school. She was educated at St Catherine’s School in Toorak, in Melbourne’s inner south-east, where she won a senior school scholarship. She finished her year 12 literature units in year 11, and enrolled in an extension program at the University of Melbourne, where she read Habermas, Foucault and Barthes.
Friedmann is Jewish on her father’s side and, despite their Ashkenazi congregation not recognising patrilineal Jews, she attended synagogue as a child with her paternal grandmother due to her father’s contrarian agnosticism. Her parents steered her away from Judaism. “I don’t believe in God per se, but I do feel very strongly Jewish,” she says. As a child, they celebrated both Easter and the Seder; their house was decorated with both a Christmas tree and a menorah. “It didn’t occur to me until I was older that that’s not the way that most people grow up.”
Her grandfather survived the Holocaust, as did five of his eight siblings. One sister died at Auschwitz. With Friedmann’s grandmother, her grandfather escaped over the border, and waited nine months at a refugee camp in Austria before being granted a visa to Australia. After coming by boat, they set up a shop in Footscray during the first wave of migration to the suburb. A severed pig’s head was left on their doorstep, so they relocated to St Kilda.
The rise of the alt-right terrifies her, and calls into question aspects of ethnicity, assimilation and the shifting targets of racism. Not many in modern Australia would look at Friedmann and categorise her as ethnic, even in view of what she calls the “strong Hungarian planes” of her brow and nose. “…Within a generation, for the most part, we have forgotten that Ashkenazi Jews ever were anything but white,” she writes. Yet the label of whiteness feels precarious to her, and guilt-laced. “We could only have obtained its protections while the nation’s punitive racial agenda was bearing down elsewhere.”
Friedmann’s son, Owen, is now four. In December 2015, the family relocated to Canberra for a three-year stint – Friedmann’s husband, Mike, works in the air force. From time to time they hike up Mount Ainslie, which has a view overlooking the city and Lake Burley Griffin. “It’s beautiful to wake up in the morning and see the mist over the mountain,” she says. They live beside the nature reserve; kangaroos bound through the suburb at night.
Recently, Friedmann has started experimenting with wool dyeing. Natural dyes are completely different to the hue of their sources, she tells me. Eucalypt leaves produce camel, raspberries dye an acidic yellow, black beans turn fabric lilac.
“I’m on a very even keel these days,” she says, though since moving she’s developed a homesickness that hasn’t abated. “I’d really like to come back to Victoria.”
For the first time, they have a traditional suburban backyard with a Hills Hoist and a garden, where Mike grows tomatoes, radishes and herbs. From the kitchen window, Friedmann watches Owen romp around outside, taking a torch out when it gets dark, exploring the worm farm. They tell stories, mould Play-Doh figures, make sock puppets. Sometimes Owen wakes her and crawls into the bed while she reads.
Lifeline 13 11 14; PANDA national helpline 1300 726 306
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Mar 25, 2017 as "Mother load". Subscribe here.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Being able to resuscitate those years and give them some sort of meaning and purpose has really put me at rest with the idea of what I went through,” she said. “When Owen was a very young baby there was a lack of real connection but now he’ll come in and snuggle with me in bed of a morning and we’ll really have a chat, he’ll invite me into his little games. It’s that connection, being involved in his dreams and stories. That’s what matters now.”
Jessica Friedmann: Things that helped my postpartum depression
By Karen Hardy
Updated3 July 2017 — 12:15amfirst published 30 June 2017 — 11:15am
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Jessica Friedmann is at the hospital, her uterus is still inflamed months after the birth of her son Owen. She's sitting in the waiting room, thinking about her old university, just across the road. How she could walk to a building where she once had French, walk up 11 flights of stairs, to room where the windows opened wide to the sky, and simply throw herself out.
Instead she stands up and walks over to the triage station.
Jessica Friedmann hopes her book about her postpartum depression allows other women to have a conversation.
Jessica Friedmann hopes her book about her postpartum depression allows other women to have a conversation.
Photo: Karleen Minney
"I think I need to be inside the doors," she says.
The nurse hands her a tissue. Friedmann hadn't even realised she was crying.
"If you could call it crying. It was as though my body simply released its load of grief, and the tears rolled sharp and salty down my face as if they would never stop."
Recent research suggests that one in five women who have given birth will experience perinatal depression. For Friedmann the experience was overwhelming. She hated herself, felt nothing for her son, hated how motherhood made her feel, how it now defined her.
"I used to think I was bulletproof," says Friedmann. "This made me realise I'm anything but."
We're drinking coffee in Braddon. It's hard to believe this woman has ever been to the dark place that so many mothers have. She's trim, her lipstick is perfect, she's intelligent, sparkling and quiet at the same time. Her book Things That Helped is the same. Her words controlled yet languid, her descriptions of those dark corners painful yet they wash over you and soothe. Reading it you think, I am not alone.
We're talking about the book, a collection of essays about her journey through postpartum depression, heart wrenching stories that touch on motherhood, creativity, and mental illness, on love and art and friendship.
But it soon becomes apparent we're talking about much more than the book.
"Women don't speak of this enough," says Friedmann.
"Women aren't meant to complain, they're meant to have a higher pain threshold. From the time we start menstruating we're told to tough it out, to put a wheat pack on our bellies, we'll be fine, go ride a horse, do cartwheels on the beach. Who are they kidding?
"It's the same sort of thing with motherhood, this idea of you asked for this, you wanted to take it on, how dare you speak about not coping with it all."
Friedmann, 30, a writer and editor, now living in Canberra, wants women to have that conversation. And if publicity for the book allows her to do that, that's an opportunity she'll take.
"There are an estimated 100,000 Australian women going through something similar and not receiving any media attention around their circumstances at all.
"It makes me so cross so many women are going through this with no support. It should be easy, you should be able to go to the hospital and say I need help and they should be adequately equipped to help.
"Can you imagine being turned away from chemotherapy because a hospital doesn't have enough beds? It wouldn't happen.
"You shouldn't have to be suicidal. Mental illness can snowball so quickly, so if you're at home and feeling isolated and need some help, that is enough, you should be able to get it."
While she doesn't consider herself an activist, Friedmann has just taken on an ambassador role with PANDSI, the ACT's support service for families experiencing perinatal depression or anxiety.
"I'm really thrilled to be working with PANDSI, as community support for new parents is so vital - a phone call with a counsellor, or a support group with childcare provided, can be the difference between complete isolation and the beginnings of recovery.
"In a political climate in which early intervention services, such as antenatal screening, are being quietly defunded, the work that they do is more crucial than ever."
Owen is five now. He brings Friedmann joy everyday. Therapy, anti-depressants, support from her family, the solid love of her husband Mike, have helped with the recovery. Writing the book too has somewhat reconciled those dark times.
"Being able to resuscitate those years and give them some sort of meaning and purpose has really put me at rest with the idea of what I went through.
"When Owen was a very young baby there was a lack of real connection but now he'll come in and snuggle with me in bed of a morning and we'll really have a chat, he'll invite me into his little games.
"It's that connection, being involved in his dreams and stories. That's what matters now."
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Things That Helped, by Jessica Friedmann. Scribe Publishing. $29.99.
If you need help contact PANDSI on 6288 1936 or PANDA on 1300 726 306 or Lifeline on 131114.