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68 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Always poetic, never depressing, 26 Feb 2003
Gwyneth Lewis wrote Sunbathing in the Rain as the book she wished she'd had when curled up like a frozen prawn with devastating depression. It's much more than that though, and you certainly don't need the same diagnosis or the same desperation to benefit from Lewis's gripping insights, which go beyond any narrow definition and plunge straight into the human condition itself.This isn't a self help book. As Lewis says, self help is the last thing a depressive needs. Instead, it's a personal account of depression, mixed with down to earth advice and good old fashioned comfort and reassurance. Aimed at depressives, it's helpful that Lewis has also broken up the text with short and realistically readable quotes from other writers who know what they're talking about. We don't get just any personal account of depression either, we get a poet's account, which to me is significant for two reasons. For a start, no-one writes prose like a poet. It might seem like bad taste to consider Sunbathing in the Rain as an exquisitely written work of literature, but it would be impossible to ignore that it is. More significantly perhaps, Lewis presents a very convincing case for a close connection between depression and the act of writing poetry. So convincing that I almost started to sympathise with the insurance company that notoriously charges fellow poet Simon Armitage considerably more to cover the risk of living his life as a writer than when he was a probation officer. There are some unsettling ideas here about the nature and possible causes of depression. Echoing Les Murray's assertion that the cure for depression is the truth, Lewis adds that depression "says the way you've been living is unbearable". A bit harder to take in its implications than the random chemical accident theory but probably more likely to save your life in the long run. Sunbathing in the Rain isn't a depressing book. Lewis meant it when she chose the subtitle, A Cheerful Book about Depression, and as a poet and truth teller, she can surely be trusted to mean the book's highly encouraging last line too - that she wouldn't swap her life now for anything.
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