Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression

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.

Author: Jessica Friedmann
Publisher: Fsg Originals
Published: 04/10/2018
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 7.40h x 5.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780374274801

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/27/2017
Kirkus Reviews 02/15/2018
Booklist 03/01/2018 pg. 12

About the Author
Jessica Friedmann is a writer and editor living in Canberra, Australia, with her husband and small son. A graduate of the University of Melbourne with an honors thesis in creative writing, for which she won an R. G. Wilson Scholarship, her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Lifted Brow, Smith Journal, Dumbo Feather, ArtsHub, The Age, and other publications. Jessica is the author of Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression.