The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
Language: English
Published by Houghton Mifflin, 2004
- First Edition
- Hardcover
- Used
Seller: Remarks Used Books, Pittsfield, MA, U.S.A.Remarks Used Books
AbeBooks seller since March 30, 2012
Condition: Used - As new
£ 30.84
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Add to basketItem description from seller
First Edition, 2nd printing. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in AS NEW condition. "What underlies the human ability, desire, and even compulsion to write? Alice Flaherty first explores the brain state called hypergraphia--the overwhelming desire to write--and then the science behind its antithesis, writer's block. As a leading neurologist at a major research hospital, Flaherty writes from the front lines of brain research. Her voice, driven and surprisingly original, has its roots in her own experiences of hypergraphia, triggered by a postpartum mood disorder. Both qualifications lend power to Flaherty's vibrant connections between the biology of human longing and the drive to communicate, between drugs and productivity, between metaphor and emotion. THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE charts exciting new territory in the relationship between the creative mind and the body. It casts light on the brain functions and dysfunctions of writers past and present, from Dostoevsky to Conrad, from Sylvia Plath to Stephen King." [publisher copy] "Flaherty mixes memoir, meditation, compendium and scholarly reportage in an odd but absorbing look at the neurological basis of writing and its pathologies. What holds this great variety of material together is not the medical authority of a doctor, the personal authority of the patient or even the technical authority of the writer, but the author's deep ambivalence about the proper approach to her subject. Where Oliver Sacks uses his stylistic gifts to transform illness into literature, Flaherty wrestles openly with the problem of equating them, putting her own identity as a scientist and as a writer on the line as she explores the possibility of describing writing in medical terms. She details the physiological sources of the impulse to write, and of the creative drive, metaphorical construction and the various modes of stalled or evaded productivity called block. She also includes accounts of what it feels like to write (or fail to write) by Coleridge and Joan Didion as well as by aphasiacs and psychotics. But while science may help one to understand or create literature, 'it may not fairly tell you that you should.' To a student of literature, Flaherty's struggle between scientific rationalism and literary exuberance is familiar romantic territory. What's moving about this book is how deeply unresolved, in an age of mood pills and weblogs, that old schism remains. Writers will delight in the way information and lore are interspersed; scientists are more likely to be divided."--Publishers Weekly. "THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE is an original, fascinating, and beautifully written reckoning of literature and moods, and of that great human passion: to write."--Kay Redfield Jamison. "Flaherty explores and explains the brain in a manner that is both novel and beautiful. The power of this work comes from her being a first-class writer who has lived this story."--Abraham Verghese. "Brilliant . . . [a] precious jewel of a book . . . that sparkles with some fresh insight or intriguing fact on practically every page."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Pristine hardcover w/brilliant corners & crisp edges, a square & tight binding, wrapped in an intact, midnight-bright jacket.…
Seller Inventory # RUB2591
- Title
- The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
- Author
- Alice W. Flaherty
- Publisher
- Houghton Mifflin
- Publication year
- 2004
- Condition
- As New
- Dust jacket
- As New
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0618230653
- ISBN 13
- 9780618230655
- Edition
- 1st Edition
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Remarks Used Books
Pittsfield, MA, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since March 30, 2012
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