RaveThe Irish Times...so remarkable and so important ... Cregan’s descriptive prose is so potent, so vivid and yet so restrained, that I suspect the initial impulse of most readers will be, as mine was, to want the book to remain on this plane of direct personal experience. But this is to fall into the trap of prejudice by reinforcing the idea that the person who has suffered in this way has nothing to offer except a subjective account of how it felt. She has much more to offer: a superbly intelligent and subtle interrogation of depression itself as a way of understanding these experiences...It is not that Cregan ever loses sight of her own story of illness and recovery – rather that she sees it (and allows us to see it) alternately from the inside and the outside, as both an extremely intimate and a broadly human truth ... Her gripping, elegant, constantly illuminating book reoccupies the clinical term \'a history of depression\'. She has that history but it does not have her. She has written herself both into and out of it.
