There’s a new mental health-oriented memoir coming out. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times article, The Prisoner of West 21st Street:

All my life I struggled to understand the connection between my mother’s moods and the place where she lived. If depression is an organic condition best treated by drugs, did it make sense to claim that her depression was caused by the deterioration of New York? Even if it’s now acceptable to attribute depression to a cataclysmic event like Sept. 11, no single watershed moment could be blamed for my mother’s blues. It’s not as if Son of Sam or the city’s near bankruptcy had put her over the edge.

Then about two years ago, as I was doing research for a book about my mother’s life, an aunt in Maine and a family friend down South sent me a cache of letters that my mother had written over the years. In her own words, these letters explained more clearly than I ever could how strongly she linked her personal burdens with conditions in her adopted city.

–Beth J. Harpaz

The book, Finding Annie Farrell, will be published this month by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.