Books for the Low Places

Some books try to lift you out of a low place by the collar. These don’t. They’re closer to a walking companion who doesn’t say much, but doesn’t leave either. The notes below are mine, not the publishers’ — short on plot, long on when each one might help.

Shi Tiesheng — 我与地坛 (The Temple of Earth and Me)

Essay1991Chinese

At twenty-one, Shi Tiesheng lost the use of his legs. For years afterwards he wheeled himself, nearly every day, into an old and half-abandoned park in Beijing, the Temple of Earth, and sat there thinking about whether — and how — to go on living. The essay is about those afternoons, about the trees and the light and the other regulars in the park, and about his mother, who used to come searching for him without letting him know she was worried.

It is slow, honest and entirely without slogans. The question of living isn’t answered so much as lived with, until it changes shape.

Read it when you want someone who thought about the hardest question patiently, in a quiet place, for a long time.

William Styron — Darkness Visible

Memoir1990

A short, precise account of a severe depression that struck the novelist in his sixties. Styron is impatient with the word depression itself, which he thought far too mild for what the illness actually does. What makes the book useful is its accuracy: it describes the thing without flinching and without dramatising it, and it insists, firmly, that this is an illness — not a weakness of will — and that people come through it.

Read it when you need someone to describe it correctly, so you can stop wondering whether you're imagining it.

Matt Haig — Reasons to Stay Alive

Memoir2015

Haig had a breakdown in his mid-twenties and wrote this years later, from the other side. The book comes in very short chapters — lists, conversations with his younger self, small observations — which makes it one of the few books you can actually read when your concentration is in pieces.

Read it when you can only manage a page at a time. That's how it was written to be read.

Rainer Maria Rilke — Letters to a Young Poet

Letterswritten 1903–1908, published 1929

Ten letters from Rilke to a young man who had written asking for advice. They wander across solitude, patience and work. What stays with people is the way Rilke treats sadness: not as something to be hurried out of the house, but as something that may be quietly changing you while it stays.

Read it when you want sadness taken seriously as part of a life, rather than as a malfunction.

Andrew Solomon — The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Non-fiction2001

A huge, generous book: part memoir, part science, part history, part reporting from people living with depression around the world. Its subtitle calls it an atlas, and it reads like one — you don’t have to go front to back. Open it to the region you need.

Read it when you're steady enough for a long book and want the whole map at once.

Yu Hua — 活着 (To Live)

Novel1993Chinese

An old farmer, Fugui, tells the story of his life, and it’s a life in which nearly everything is taken from him, one person at a time. It sounds unbearable. Somehow it isn’t. The novel doesn’t argue for hope or explain why things happen. It just keeps going, alongside a man who keeps going.

Read it when you've had enough of books that tell you why, and want one that simply continues.

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Books can keep you company, but they can’t take a call at three in the morning. If you need a person rather than a page, the lantern is always lit.