Pearson never finds satisfactory answers to her self-interro-
gations, but the professionals do not do much better. The angriest pages in her book are devoted to the psychiatrists who put her on a regimen of anti-anxiety medications, which dulled the static in her brain but left her "in an emotional half-light," secure but disengaged.
"I'd watch movies without being stirred by them, listen to music without real interest," she writes. "In truth, I began to feel faintly sociopathic." She became addicted to Effexor, and late in the book drops the small bombshell that, as she writes, she has been off an antidepressant called Lexapro for only six weeks.
Pearson married and had children. She has a successful writing career. But the woman she describes can barely hold her life together. One night she dreams that she is lying on a cushioned bench admiring the Grand Canyon. Suddenly she realizes that the bench is attached at one end to a cliff face but is otherwise suspended in midair.
"If I moved even an inch in any direction, I would fall for miles," she writes. "The choking panic that I felt was extraordinary. I felt a perfect - a Platonic - sense of terror."
That, in a nutshell, is her situation, one that she addresses through therapy, pull-up-your-socks willpower and a blend of religion and the insights of writers like the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. It all seems touch and go - but give her major points for wit and flair. The author biography on the dust jacket reads: "She lives in Toronto with her husband, her two children and her dread."
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