Endless tears flow like a rushing mountain stream through Adrienne Martini’s memoir, a frank exploration of how nature, nurture, nerves and numbness sent her to a mental hospital after the birth of her first child. But just as sunlight can make even troubled waters sparkle, Martini’s wisecracking humor glimmers throughout, making this painful story more tolerable.
Martini’s condition, which put down ugly roots during her not-so-happy childhood, was postpartum depression. More serious than the “baby blues” that temporarily derail some exhausted and hormonally overwhelmed mothers, yet not as disastrous as psychosis, it nevertheless can endanger mothers and their babies.
In her book, “Hillbilly Gothic: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood” (Free Press, 221 pages, $23), Martini describes her emotionally fraught reaction to motherhood:
“It’s like getting the best Christmas gift ever, but Santa decided to kick the crap out of you before you unwrapped it.”
To explain what happened to her and why, she gives a history of the condition — “crazy mothers are nothing new,” she deadpans — and her family story, ridden with manic depression, suicide, breakdowns and other ills going back generations. This information had to be pried from proud, close-mouthed people not given to sharing details of their infirmities, even with family.
Martini accepted her mother’s crying jags and post-divorce bitterness as normal, as she did her own bouts of unwarranted sadness and anxiety attacks. She and her husband, Scott, finding themselves not hip enough for Austin, Texas, and not religious enough for Knoxville, nevertheless make a go of it in Tennessee, until she learns she is pregnant.
Spoiling that good news is her escalating fear she will never be a good mother. What with her difficult labor, inability to nurse, nights without sleep and overwhelming certainty she is an impostor as a mother, Martini breaks down.
Supported by her husband, family and friends and enduring her mother’s mix of scolding, quarreling, baby-sitting and demanding love, she enters a Knoxville hospital.She is diagnosed with “a disorder of mood rather than a disorder of thought.” As if that hurts any less.
With drugs, therapy, love and her body’s gradual healing, Martini attains an at-first precarious reality and eventually the stability to have another child. It’s a difficult journey, well told.
The telling includes journal excerpts whose blunt honesty someday might shock her daughter:
“Part of the problem is that I’m not really sure if I love you yet. I mean, I love the idea of you and the you you will become, but right now you’re just a crying, pooping ball of need that threw my life out of control.”
Such wrenching words take guts to share, but they show the clear-headedness Martini knows she will need if someday her daughter should follow family tradition and “fall into her own emotional hell.”
