Mockingbird Years: A Life In And Out Of Therapy - Softcover

Throughout my years as Dr. G's patient, I felt a guilty and unshakable conviction that I was completely sane and that I had health to squander. Of course, my notion that patients were expected to be crazy was naive, but I had swallowed whole the familiar ideology that connects madness to beauty of spirit.... I loved the notion of myself as saucer-eyed and frail, and I was ashamed of the blunt and caustic person I knew I was. I hoped that if I applied myself, I might evolve toward becoming the fragile and lovable being I so wished to be. I was looking for transformation, not cure. I wasn't interested in being happier but in growing more poignantly, becomingly, meaningfully unhappy.

She found these in her unorthodox relationship with psychologist Leslie Farber, who she followed from the psychiatric hospital to New York City. In conventional terms, there are any number of things wrong with this picture: Gordon basically attached herself to Farber's family, spending hours of each day simply hanging out at his Upper West Side apartment. Even Gordon could see how unhealthy her dependence was, and she broke off their therapy. Nevertheless, the rest of Mockingbird Years is in some sense a mash note to Dr. Farber, the man who by simply being himself--by being her friend--freed her to pursue "the conscious life." These days, she conducts her ongoing inquiry into self and the world through writing, "very much like therapy," Gordon tells us, "except the therapist is absent and I've given up all ambition to get well." By now we are used to the narrative of salvation through therapy; it has become its own genre, a Lives of the Saints for our age. Mockingbird Years is a very different beast indeed. Scathing, witty, and profoundly unsentimental, it will peel the paint right off your psychic walls. --Mary Park