The author learned to address the practicalities: “Losing your mind, like losing your keys, is a hassle.” Photograph by Nick Waplington Soon I couldn’t remember what pleasurable moods had been like. I kept redating the beginning of the depression: since my breakup with my girlfriend, the past October since my mother’s death since the beginning of her two-year illness since puberty since birth. But now, as I ran through this inventory I believed that my depression was not only a rational state but also an incurable one. I’d felt acutely that there was no excuse for it under the circumstances, despite perennial existential crises, the forgotten sorrows of a distant childhood, slight wrongs done to people now dead, the truth that I am not Tolstoy, the absence in this world of perfect love, and those impulses of greed and uncharitableness which lie too close to the heart-that sort of thing. It was when life was finally in order that depression came slinking in and spoiled everything. I had come to terms with my mother’s death three years earlier, was publishing my first novel, was getting along with my family had emerged intact from a powerful two-year relationship, had bought a beautiful new house, was writing well. I did not experience depression until I had pretty much solved my problems.
