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As new condition black-and-white photographic boards contained in an as new condition non price-clipped transparent/translucent dust jacket with gold front cover and spine lettering. Includes Author Dedication; Epilogue: A Letter From Cuba; Appendix: Resources for Mental Health, Substance Abuse, and Better Living; and Acknowledgments. Illustrated with a section of both black-and-white and color photographic plates. "The world breaks everyone and afterward some people are strong at the broken places." - Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. "7 suicides. Depression. Bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia. Addiction. All in one celebrated, beautiful, brilliant family. The Hemingway family - like millions of other families - has struggled for generations with the pain and shame of mental illness, depression, and addiction. Sadly, they know the tragic reality of suicide and the enduring heartache of those left behind. Born just months after her celebrated novelist grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, took his own life, Mariel grew up with both the promise and the burden of her family's name: immense talent and energy on the one hand, a painful legacy of alcoholism, mental illness, and suicide on the other. The youngest of three sisters, Mariel quickly learned to navigate the treacherous contradictions in her own family: a loving but withdrawn, alcoholic father, a depressed mother who struggled to show affection and who spent years fighting cancer, and two troubled older sisters who grew increasingly out of control. Most evenings, bottles of wine were consumed to smooth over the tensions - but instead ended smashed against the walls. Mariel, hiding under her covers in fear, would sneak downstairs in the middle of the night to clean up after her parents' fights, hoping always to make things right - and normal. Ambitious and eager to escape the chaos of home, Mariel embarked on an acting career at a young age, earning an Oscar nomination in Woody Allen's Manhattan. At the same time, her stunningly beutiful sister Margaux made a dizzying ascent as an iconic supermodel, but all of that would come undone, as Mariel relates in moving detail, as Margaux turned to alcohol and drugs, fell deep into depression, and finlly, suicide - the seventh member of the extended family to do so. Her other sister, Muffet, also began a lifelong battle with mental illness. Mariel, too, struggled. The specter of depression and childhood traumas haunted her. What followed was a decades-long battle with eating disorders (only raw vegetables one month, iced coffee and snack food the next), obsessions about her weight, control issues, and endless mantras in her journal, and unhealthy, needy relationships that left her empty. She tried anything to make her feel in control. But she fought back, found a healthy plan, and against the odds, she flourished. Though in her darkest moments she often felt alone, she was anything but that. Almost a quarter of Americans suffer from some form of mental illness, and more than ten percent struggle with substance abuse. Rates of depression have been growing rapidly since 2000. Worldwide, over 800,000 people die by suicide every year - that's one person every forty seconds. Yet these deaths are often preventable. Mariel knows that there is still a veil of shame associated with mental illness and knows too the pain and heartbreak for families. With candor and clarity, Mariel demonstrates that with compassion, education, and understanding, there is a way out of the darkness." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.
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