Jessica Friedmann navigates her recovery from postpartum depression in a wide-ranging collection of personal essays
Things That Helped is a memoir in essays, detailing the Australian writer Jessica Friedmann's recovery from postpartum depression. In each essay, she focuses on a separate totemic object-from pho red lips to the musician Anohni, to tell a story that is both deeply personal and culturally resonant. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and her own experience, Friedmann's wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness. Occasionally confrontational, but always powerfully moving and beautifully observed, Things That Helped charts her return into the world: a slow and complex process of reassembling what depression fractured, and sometimes broke.
"A necessary and compelling collection of essays . . . In reading Friedmann, one thing is clear: she is an extraordinary thinker, a precise and complex writer, a tireless seeker of le mot juste. . . Watching a keen mind wrestle is one of the pleasures of reading nonfiction, and this book is a prime example . . . Despite the horror she narrates, her prose rarely strays from a calm, thoughtful tone.
Katharine Coldiron, Proximity
"A beautifully lyrical and intellectually complex series of essays . . . Jessica Friedmann is able to celebrate and interrogate the vivid, grotesque, and sublime tissues of the female body."
