Welcome to My Breakdown: A Memoir

by Benilde Little

Overview

In her “eminently readable memoir about turning darkness back into light” (People), the nationally bestselling author of Good Hair candidly shares her journey from having it all to plunging into a deep depression after her beloved mother’s death—and finally climbing back out.

Benilde Little’s life appeared perfect. A bestselling novelist with two beautiful children, a handsome husband, a gorgeous home, and good friends, she had every reason to feel on top of the world. She was mindful of the sacrifices that enabled her to prosper and never took the good life for granted. But when illness and aging overtook her parents, and other challenges suddenly loomed, she went into a tailspin of clinical depression.

Little chronicles her descent into a cavern so dark and impenetrable that she didn’t know if she’d ever recover. But, as she learns, the only road out of depression is through it. She reflects back on her protected upbringing in Newark, New Jersey; celebrates her remarkable mother; and tracks her youth from an early relationship with the Nation of Islam, to the city life of a young professional, to the domesticity of the suburbs. After finding herself sandwiched between the twin demands of elder care and childcare, she explores how, with therapy and introspection, she regained her voice and mapped a way out of her depression.

Writing in the courageous tradition of great female storytellers such as Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, and Pearl Cleage, Little doesn’t hold back as she shares insights, inspiration, and intimate details of her life with her trademark candor and fearlessness. Powerful, relatable, and ultimately redemptive, Welcome to My Breakdown is a remarkable memoir about the strength within us all to rise from despair and to feel hope and joy again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476751979
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	04/21/2015
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Benilde Little  is the bestselling author of the novels Good Hair (selected as one of the ten best books of 1996 by the Los Angeles Times), The Itch, Acting Out, and Who Does She Think She Is? A former reporter for People and senior editor at Essence, she lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband and son. Her daughter is away at college. Follower her on Twitter and Instagram @BenildeLittle and read her blog, Welcome to My Breakdown, at BenildeLittle.Wordpress.com.

Read an Excerpt

Welcome to My Breakdown

Mom holding me up in our backyard, 1958.

MY MOTHER was gone. I never thought I would survive her death.

I was, in so many ways, her creation. She literally spoke me into being. When she was pregnant with me, she told everyone she was having a girl, and they believed her. This was 1958, when she was in her thirties, and no one had even heard of amniocentesis. Her friends at her job at St. Michael’s Medical Center decorated the nurses’ lounge in pink, and all the baby presents were pink: the jumpers, booties, coats, and hats. “I told that doctor, ‘If it’s a boy, don’t even bring him to me,’ ” she used to tell me. She had already birthed three sons and was ready to welcome her daughter.

After I arrived, she went to work designing her girl. I would have everything she thought her cherished daughter should have. I took piano and ballet lessons, and wore well-made white shirts with Peter Pan collars and wool plaid jumpers and skirts. I even wore a camel hair coat to my elementary school, which was right across the street from our house, close enough for my mother to watch over me. I was an introspective child, quick to cry, more at ease with my books and dolls than with the rough-and-tumble of the playground. As tough and no-nonsense as my mother could be, she had breathed into me not just life but also the gift of sensitivity. I felt everything too deeply. The gift would become my burden.

My brother Marc, me, and Mom at Easter in Weequahic Park.

For the two years before my mother died, I had been in a midlife malaise made worse by the arrival of menopause and the unrelenting routine of ferrying school-age children while caring for my aging parents. When my mother stopped breathing, I fell deep into a cavern of grief. I missed her with an ache that bore into every cell of my body. I couldn’t get out of bed, other than to wake my daughter up for eighth grade, drive my son, a second grader, to school, and slug through walking Charlie, my constant companion in the form of a bichon-poodle mix. My entire body hurt, yet I was numb. When my family came home in the evening, I’d move from my bed to the sectional in the basement and watch TV. It didn’t matter what was on. I simply wanted the noise.

I had expected to feel grief for the first several months, but then seven months passed, eight, a year, and I still couldn’t lift myself out of the pervasive sadness. I didn’t know what to do. When I climbed into bed at night, this feeling, this “nausea of the soul,” as the writer David Foster Wallace described it, clung to me along with my pajamas and woke up in the night before I did. It greeted me as I opened my eyes at two, three, four in the morning, and I would turn to look at my husband, Cliff, lying on the pillow next to mine.

Feeling me stir, Cliff would open his eyes.

“You’re going to have to put me away,” I would tell him every morning and every night. “I can’t keep going like this.”

Cliff had lost his father to cancer only two months before my mom died, and he was still wrestling with his own grief, but he pushed it away to try and help me deal with mine.

“You just miss her,” he said, trying to soothe me. “It’ll pass.”

But it didn’t.

I made an appointment with a therapist provided by the hospice that had helped care for my mother during her final days. This couldn’t be normal grief, I told the grad student sitting in for the psychologist, who’d had an emergency and didn’t show. The student was empathetic but ineffectual. I was so swamped by sorrow at that point, it’s possible no one could have reached me. I remembered how Cliff had cried when we got the news about his dad; how he had comforted his mom and helped plan a beautiful memorial service and then eventually went back to work. He was sad, for sure; he had worshipped his dad, but he had remained himself as he dealt with everything, even maintaining his outrageous sense of humor.

I, on the other hand, was most definitely not myself.

Whenever I talked about my needing to be institutionalized, Cliff would respond with his trademark wit. “You’ll be like Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, with dark sunglasses on in a white bathrobe and a towel around your head,” he joked.

He could always make me laugh, but this time, nothing. The Mack truck–sized depression refused to move. I had become emotionally unglued. I had officially fallen apart. But what I’ve learned on this journey through clinical depression is that my breakdown was actually about me learning how to own my sensitivity and love myself in all of my vulnerability, all my privilege and confusion and loss. This is the story of my mother and the life she dreamed for me. It’s also the story of the dank joylessness I fell into after she died, and how one breath at a time I am finding my way through.

Editorial Reviews

"An important book for any person who has ever been in love, who has ever dreamed of stepping out of one class to the next, who believes in possibilities. It's a funny, touching, and real love story, with characters you wish you knew and some you hope never to meet. A superb debut."

on Good Hair - James McBride

"Little has written some might consider an oxymoron...a Black comedy of manners....An absorbing read."

on Good Hair - Karen Grigsby-Bates

"A nuanced, Edith Wharton-style treatment of the upper reaches of black society...Little is an arbiter of that insular world."

on The Itch - The Washington Post

"Welcome To MyBreakdown will put you face-to-face with the realitiesof personal pain. What Benilde shares is a heroic demonstration of how toturn depression and loss into a path back to self. Her willingness to beopen and authentic creates a healing prescription for us all. What ablessing!"

on Welcome to My Breakdown - Iyanla Vanzant

"Benilde Little takes the fabric of suffering and weaves it into a raw, honest, and wonderful story of love and loss. Readers who have felt the depth of enduring sadness will see themselves in this deeply moving memoir."

on Welcome to My Breakdown - Janet Taylor

"When we face the fire and come out on the other side, we learn what it is we are called to do. Benilde has written so beautifully and eloquently about the soul-crushing experience of depression — whether it is named or not. Throughout this defining journey, we see, hear, and feel deeply the signs of a despair that longs for light and relief. The healing is in us sharing our stories with one another... and knowing we are not alone."

Terrie M. Williams

"Little transcends the familiar. Her prose sings its own brokenhearted tune... Most memoirs describe journeys of self-discovery and redemption, and Little’s is no exception. At its conclusion, though, she doesn’t surge back to life sorrow-free. Rather, she leaves us with a sense that the twin strands of toughness and tenderness within her have braided themselves into a kind of equilibrium. After traveling these fearless pages with her, readers will cross their fingers, hoping the balance holds."

New Jersey Monthly

"Told in her own fearless and wise voice, Welcome to My Breakdown chronicles a cavern of depression so dark that Benilde didn't know if she'd ever recover... Compelling read... Writing in the courageous tradition of great female storytellers such as Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Joan Didion, Pearl Cleage and Sista Souljah, Benilde doesn't hold back as she shares insights, inspiration, and intimate details of her life. Powerful, relatable, and ultimately redemptive, Welcome to My Breakdown is a remarkable memoir about the power within us all to rise from despair and to feel hope and joy again."

digitaljournal.com

"One of the Best New Books — An eminently readable memoir about turning darkness back into light."

PEOPLE Magazine

"Breakdown takes a slight departure from her four novels, with major creative results... Lively anecdotes...achingly honest detail...Little gets herself together, piece by broken piece..."

ESSENCE

"What Benilde shares is a heroic demonstration of how toturn depression and loss into a path back to self. Her willingness to beopen and authentic creates a healing prescription for us all." ---Iyanla Vanzant, author of In the Meantime and Every Day I Pray

From the Publisher

"A moving memoir."

Juicy