'I was supposed to be having the time of my life.' When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society...

After suffering a miscarriage, Margo sinks into a deep depression. She enters a psychiatric hospital, but ends by fleeing that place. In desperation, she kidnaps a baby.

Explores how binge eating, drinking, and overthinking work together to threaten the health and well-being of women, and offers advice on how women can overcome these three problems and lead happier, more productive lives.

"This Close to Happy is the first account to endeavor to tell the story of what it feels to suffer a lifetime's worth of clinical depression from the inside out and from a woman's point of view"-- "Despair is always described as dull," writes Daphne Merkin, "when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver." This Close to Happy--Merkin's rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer...