and "During my years as a patient, I felt a guilty and unshakeable conviction that I was completely sane. Of course, my notion that patients were expected to be crazy was a naive one, but I had swallowed whole the ideology that connects madness to beauty of spirit. In fact, I wasn't interested in being happier, but in growing more poignantly, becomingly, meaningfully unhappy. and "Here, in her own words, is Emily Fox Gordon, therapy veteran, sometime mental patient, and a prize-winning essayist whose writing Rosellen Brown has praised as and "acute and engaging... a combination of wit, rigor and deep feeling. and " In this astounding memoir, she tells the story of her and "therapeutic education, and " marked by no fewer than five therapists before she turned seventeen. At eighteen, after a half-hearted suicide attempt, Gordon, mired in adolescent angst, began a three-year sojourn at the prestigious Austen Riggs sanitarium. It was at Riggs that Gordon was and "rescued and " by the maverick psychoanalyst Leslie Farber. Beautifully crafted, and startling in its observations of the therapeutic enterprise, Mockingbird Years is an auspicious debut by a major new talent.