She writes powerfully about the disorienting shift in her sense of self ... Inferno contains excerpts from a notebook Cho kept during her hospitalisation, while she was still uncertain how she came to be there and how best to be released ... Given that becoming a mother is haloed with sentimentality for too many people, Cho is courageous in sharing her harrowing descent into postpartum psychosis. With its clear-eyed view of how a family’s cultural expectations can torment a well-educated, cosmopolitan woman giving birth for the first time, Inferno is a welcome addition to the small and growing shelf of memoirs where...women tell true stories of the often overwhelming cost of bringing a child into the world.
One of the many fascinating things about this beautifully written book is that it asks us to consider what counts as normal behaviour and what doesn’t ... This is a highly accomplished memoir. Cho deftly weaves the strands of her experience to create something striking and original. It is also a love story.
Inferno is a brilliantly frightening memoir about Cho’s two weeks on the psychiatric ward, elegantly interwoven with tales from her past ... Insights of this kind are rarely explicit. Cho’s language is poetically associative and points are made through suggestive juxtaposition. Fragmentary structures can feel merely fashionable, but here it feels hard won ... one of the book’s most compelling suggestions is that even ordinary motherhood resembles psychosis ... among the book’s strengths is its bravery in admitting that the 'fierce, possessive affection' she feels for her baby is very different from the kind of in‑love feeling she expected.
In her in-laws’ home, under their loving but anxious gaze, Cho begins to sense something is not right ... The intensity of the first-person perspective here gives this section the claustrophobic dread of a psychological thriller. Cho conveys how an atmosphere of constant anxiety and judgment slowly loosens her grip on what is real and what is imagined ... Inferno is a disturbing and masterfully told memoir, but it’s also an important one that pushes back against powerful taboos ... Discussions of severe mental illness in mothers continue to induce discomfort and judgment in those who have never experienced it, and embarrassment and shame in those who have. The persistence of such stigmas makes memoirs like Cho’s all the more courageous.
Cho’s entry into her particular Hell is mediated for the reader by the book’s narrative structure. She moves between memories – shifting and incomplete – of her twelve days in a New Jersey psychiatric ward and those of her life ... Capturing the onset and the experience of delusion in writing must be difficult, but Cho manages to do so with exquisitely weighted prose that compels you to empathize rather than strain to understand. This is a courageous and powerful book about a subject that calls for more conversation and research.
In Cho’s hands, the story of her psychosis is also one of her growing up and knitting together her sense of self, even as that self is coming ferociously undone ... There is a sublime quality to this temporal movement. Her illness looms large and mythic, even in its terror ... Cho’s expression of her experience of madness is poetic, and like much good poetry, it points its finger to the lies in our so-called reality.
...eerie, unsettling ... This piercing narrative about motherhood and a fraying human mind will slowly and creepily pull the reader in and leave a chill.
Haunting and emotionally intense, this powerful memoir explores the hidden connections that tie families across generations, offering poignant meditations on the meaning of motherhood and identity ... A compelling look at a mysterious mental illness.
