Daphne Merkin – författare

Daphne Merkin brings her signature combination of wit, candor, and penetrating intelligence to subjects that touch on every aspect of contemporary culture, from the high calling of the literary life to the poignant underside of celebrity and our collective fixation on fame. Merkin's elegant, widely admired profiles go beneath the glossy facades to consider their vulnerabilities and demons, as well as their enduring hold on us. Here one will encounter a gallery of complex, unforgettable celebrities, from Marilyn Monroe to Mike Tyson, and from Courtney Love to Truman Capote. Merkin also offers reflections on writers as varied as Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, John Updike, and Alice Munro. Most of all, though, Merkin is a writer who is not afraid to implicate herself as a participant in our consumerist and overstimulated culture. Merkin helps makes sense of our collective impulses. From a brazenly honest and deeply empathic observer, The Fame Lunches shines a light on truths we often prefer to keep veiled and in doing so opens up the conversation for all of us.

Daphne Merkin has been hospitalised three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalisations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls "the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome." "The opposite of depression," she writes with characteristic insight, "is not a state of unimaginable happiness ... but a state of relative all-right-ness." Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that many share but few talk about, one that remains shrouded in stigma. • For readers of Andrew Solomon and Ariel Levy • National Indie Bestseller

A novel of unsurpassed candor, punctuated by bold ruminations on love, marriage, family, sex, gender, and relationships, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love depicts one woman’s psychological descent into sexual captivity. This is the story of the extremes to which she will go to achieve erotic bliss and of her struggle to regain her soul.As Daphne Merkin’s audacious new novel opens, a wife and mother looks back at the moment when her life as a young book editor is upended by a casual encounter with an intriguing man who seems to intuit her every thought.Convinced she’s found the one, Judith Stone succumbs to the push and pull of her sexual entanglement with Howard Rose, constantly seeking his attention and approval. That is, until she realises that beneath his erotic obsession with her, Howard is intent on obliterating any sense of self she possesses. As Merkin writes, his was “the allure of remoteness, affection edged in ice.” Escaping Howard’s grasp and her own perverse enjoyment of being under his control will test the limits of Judith’s capacity to resist the siren call of submission.Narrated by Judith in a time before the #MeToo movement, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love charts the persistent hold the past has on us and the way it shapes our present.