...a triumph on many levels ... as insightful and beautifully written as it is brave. Merkin clearly understands the risks of going public with such intimate, dark material and refuses the unrealistic comfort of an unequivocally redemptive ending ... Less sympathetic readers may carp at Merkin’s ability to afford the luxuries of expensive, seemingly unlimited treatment options, cosmetic surgeries and summer rentals in the Hamptons. (Merkin readily acknowledges that her hardships pale in comparison with what people go through in Syria or Haiti.) But anyone who has experienced or witnessed the pain of clinical depression up close can’t help but be moved by her struggle. This Close to Happy earns a place among the canon of books on depression.

...one of the most accurate, and therefore most harrowing, accounts of depression to be written in the last century ... Ms. Merkin speaks candidly and beautifully about aspects of the human condition that usually remain pointedly silent ... he book reads like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar stripped of its novelistic turns and symbolism ... a rare insight that dawns only in the twilight of a life like Ms. Merkin’s: that this deep, but not uncommon, sadness is not a condition to be cured but to be weathered.

In the earlier part of her memoir, her tight focus on her own story at the expense of anyone else’s can come off as self-indulgent, even self-aggrandizing, but it is part of her considerable art that by the end, it feels like a winning frankness. The reader is saved from diaristic fatigue by the sharpness of her observations ... she narrates what happened and how it felt to her. And she does so with insight, grace and excruciating clarity, in exquisite and sometimes darkly humorous prose. The same tinge of self-aware narcissism that makes the book at times so annoying makes it finally triumphant. Merkin is unlikely to cheer you up, but if your misery loves company, you will find no better companion. This is not a how-to-get-better book, but we hardly need another one of those; it is a how-to-be-desolate book, which is an altogether more crucial manual ... it is standard fare to say that books on depression are brave, but this one actually is. For all its highly personal focus, it is an important addition to the literature of mental illness.

...Merkin's ranging, nimble, eloquent intellect in a pitched battle with the albatross ... Puzzles are the cornerstone of Merkin's ars poetica, especially the dangerous thrill of facing one's own puzzles and acknowledging 'their often shadowy solutions.' Merkin's writing is all about rigorous self-reflection...One aspect of This Close to Happy is unmistakably its realistic, non-paradigmatic portrayal of depression. Another is the puzzle of her mother, and the effect that her 'looming shadow' had on Merkin's life and her illness ... Merkin stays true to the dismal reality of chronic depression—but in a warm, articulate, positive-outlook kind of way.

The book gets off to a rocky start — Merkin jumps around a lot, trying out an awkward second- and third-person narration before settling comfortably into a more obvious first — but after that, she moves easily between the present and the past, between her personal story and the more general observations and concerns she has to share about her disease. Above all, Merkin, like Styron, wants us to understand what it means to be depressed. In scene after scene, she shows us how insidiously depression invades her thoughts, the impact it has had on her career, and the many ways it strains her relationships with family, friends, and lovers ... there are times when, instead of stepping back to observe her depression, she gets bogged down in it ... The devil is in the details, and some readers will lose patience with the juxtaposition of the emotional privations Merkin so painstakingly describes and the privileges she so casually reveals ... she does, in this memoir, what good writers do: she sends urgent, cogent dispatches from another world, a protracted battlefield that we might not otherwise know about.

It may be obvious that a book about depression will be tough going. Merkin spares no detail in outlining the illness that has plagued her all her life ... Readers will need a fair amount of patience to wade through the personal details. There is a lot of angst over various family dynamics, and speculation about which parent or sibling must have been thinking what at which point in time ... Passages on suicide are among the most heartrending ... a frank, fearless, self-absorbed look at one woman's experiences. And as such, it succeeds in ways that other memoirs have not — by revealing mental illness not as the unwanted gift of a crazed genius, but as an everyday curse for everyday people.