Maybe Read This Book: Inglorious

Inglorious, by Joanna Kavenna (I love love LOVE rhyming names, don't you?), is about Rosa Lane. When the book begins, Rosa, thrown by the recent death of her mother, resigns from her job. When she gets home, her partner of ten years, Liam, breaks up with her and very quickly gets engaged to her closest friend. Rosa then falls into a deep depression. With no job, no money, and nowhere to live, she sponges off friends whose sympathy quickly turns to disgust. Everyday she pretends that this will be the day she gets it together, and everyday she writes some variation of the following list:

Things to do, Monday
Get a job.
Wash your clothes.
Clean the kitchen.
Phone Liam and ask about the furniture.
Buy some tuna and spaghetti.
Go to the bank and beg for an extension--more money, more time to pay back the rest of your debt.
Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.
Read The Golden Bough, the Nag Hammadi gospels, the Upanishads, the Koran, The Bible, the Tao, the complete works of E.A. Wallis Budge.
Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhaur, Kierkegaarde, Nietzche, and the rest.
Hoover the living room.
Clean the toilet.
Distinguish the various philosophies of the way.
Clean the bath.

And everyday none of it gets done.

Joanna Kavenna (oh my gosh, I love the cadence of that name) wrote this book beautifully. The reader is inside Rosa's mind, and it's lyrical and poetic and biting and funny in a way that the standard depressive's mind is not. However, the reader is still inside a depressive's mind, and it is dark and close and oppressive. If you have never suffered clinical depression, this book will make you understand what it feels when you're trying to pull yourself out of the gutter of a disordered mind far better than any textbook. If you have been depressed, this book will be like a war flashback.

It took Herculean strength for me to finish this book; I dreaded opening it and felt claustrophobic while reading it. I have been Rosa. I have made that list in my head every morning and gone to sleep every night a failure. The first thing on my list was usually Put on Pants. Then, Get a job. Call your professors. Write Danny a check. Take out the trash. Clean up the sunflower seeds you spilled. Learn Portugese. Move to Brazil. Read the entire Western Canon. Write the Great American Novel. The thing is, and what the book brilliantly drives home, is that when you're depressed, everything on that list is equally likely. When you can barely get out of bed, taking out the trash is just as daunting a task as "distinguish[ing] the philosophies of the way." I was lucky; I had better friends and stronger support than Rosa did. I had enough people caring about me that one day I believed in myself enough to wake up and put on pants. I got healthier, little by little, inch by inch.

So should you read this book? Maybe. It's no fun, and it can be a hard slog through its two hundred odd pages. Rosa's woes are repetitive and unrelenting. But if you have friends or family members whose inability to just get over it and pull themselves together tries your patience, I think you should. It may help you realize that they would love to pick themselves up and dust themselves off, they just can't remember how.