Free The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon Page A

because it is finished, and already when I was twelve, I lamented the time that had gone by. Even in the best of spirits, it’salways been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.
    I remember my early twenties as reasonably placid. I decided, almost on a whim, to become an adventurer and took to ignoring my anxiety even when it was connected to frightening situations. Eighteen months after I finished my graduate work, I started traveling back and forth to Soviet Moscow and lived part-time in an illegal squat with some artists I got to know there. When someone tried to mug me one night in Istanbul, I resisted successfully and he ran off without having got anything from me. I allowed myself to consider every kind of sexuality; I left most of my repressions and erotic fears behind. I let my hair get long; I cut it short. I performed with a rock band a few times; I went to the opera. I had developed a lust for experience, and I had as many experiences as I could in as many places as I could afford to visit. I fell in love and set up happy domestic arrangements.
    And then in August 1989, when I was twenty-five, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and my irreproachable world began to crumble. If she had not fallen ill, my life would have been completely different; if that story had been a little bit less tragic, then perhaps I would have gone through life with depressive tendencies but no breakdown; or perhaps I would have had a breakdown later on as part of midlife crisis; or perhaps I would have had one just when and as I did. If the first part of an emotional biography is precursor experiences, the second part is triggering experiences. Most severe depressions have precursor smaller depressions that have passed largely unnoticed or simply unexplained. Of course many people who never develop depression have experiences that would retrospectively be defined as precursor episodes if they had led to anything, and that get dropped out of memory only because what they might have foreshadowed never materializes.
    I will not detail how everything fell apart because to those who have known wasting sickness this will be clear and to those who have not it remains perhaps as inexplicable as it was to me when I was twenty-five. Suffice it to say that things were dreadful. In 1991, my mother died. She was fifty-eight. I was paralytically sad. Despite many tears and enormous sorrow, despite the disappearance of the person I had depended on so constantly and for so long, I did okay in the period after my mother’s death. I was sad and I was angry, but I was not crazy.
    That summer, I began psychoanalysis. I told the woman who would be my analyst that I needed one promise before I could begin, and that was that she would continue the analysis through until we had completed it, no matter what happened, unless she became seriously ill. She was in her late sixties. She agreed. She was a charming and wise womanwho reminded me a little bit of my mother. I relied on our daily meetings to keep my grief contained.
    In early 1992, I fell in love with someone who was brilliant, beautiful, generous, kind, and fantastically present in all our relations, but who was also incredibly difficult. We had a tumultuous though often happy relationship. She became pregnant in the autumn of 1992 and had an abortion, which gave me an unanticipated feeling of loss. In late 1993, the week before my thirtieth birthday, we broke up by mutual agreement and with much mutual pain. I slipped another ratchet down.
    In March 1994, my analyst told me that she was retiring because the commute from her Princeton house into New York had become too burdensome. I had been feeling disconnected from our work together and had been considering terminating it; nonetheless, when she broke that news, I burst into uncontrollable sobs and cried for an hour. I don’t usually cry much; I hadn’t cried like that since my mother’s death. I