A Tragic Honesty, like the Ian Hamilton biography of Lowell that I read recently, is a sad and occasionally terrifying account of how creativity can be simultaneously fragile and self-destructive; it also made me grateful that I am writing now, when the antidepressants are better, and we all drink less. Stories about contemporary writers being taken away in straitjackets are thin on the ground - or no one tells them to me, anyway - but it seemed to happen to Lowell and Yates all the time; there are ten separate page references under 'breakdowns' in the index of A Tragic Honesty.
( Nick Hornby )
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