Memoir shuns glitz to expose inner torment
Publishing superstar details lifelong struggle with depression
Kazuo Ishiguro called him “lovely.” Andrew Solomon said he “raises the level of discourse across the country.” Salman Rushdie, who has not been in the habit of giving interviews while recovering from an attack, made an exception, calling him “a warm and deeply emotional human being” whose “cultural span is broad and deep.” He added, “I love him very much.”
The man in question, Luiz Schwarcz, is that most exotic of creatures, a publishing celebrity. He founded Companhia das Letras, the largest publisher in Brazil, but his influence can be felt across the literary world, where he has a reputation as a tastemaker with the power to make an author’s career.
With his wife, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, an anthropologist, Luiz Schwarcz is a central figure of Brazil’s intelligentsia but also part of a cadre of publishing luminaries who broker deals on a global scale.
Yet you’ll find none of that in Schwarcz’s memoir, “The Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression,” recently released in the U.S. by Penguin Press. There are no anecdotes about Susan Sontag’s taste in Beethoven recordings or Oliver Sacks’ entertaining quirks. Certainly no litany of international awards or roster of celebrated writers both foreign and domestic.
Indeed, a reader coming to this slim, modest volume with no knowledge of the author would finish it knowing little of his celebrity or his undeniable success. What they would see is a man grappling with bipolar disorder.
“I have got many friends,
writers; they know that I am quiet, but they never knew what I had, what I have,” Schwarcz said in a recent interview. Indeed, to those who have known only the courtly, controlled man of letters with the encyclopedic knowledge of classical music, the account may come as a shock.
“I had no idea that he suffered from depression,” says Ishiguro, who has known Schwarcz, his Brazilian publisher, for some 20 years.
Here is Schwarcz frankly acknowledging the violence and outbursts occasioned by his bipolar disorder, the suicidal depths of his depression, the lifelong battle to find the right medication and navigate its side effects, the devastating toll on his loved ones. The disorder has informed every moment of his life.
Part of the book’s power comes in the fact that Schwarcz is, by any measure, a success; those who can keep such an illness to themselves are rarely inclined to share their struggles with the world. In part because of this reticence, the image of mental illness, for many, has become associated with the visibly unwell rather than with those who deal successfully — if constantly — with their conditions.
“Here’s somebody who is highly regarded and accomplished and who has suffered, you know, really quite terribly,” said Solomon, a friend who was aware of the extent of Schwarcz’s struggles. “And he does not whitewash his experience, and he doesn’t turn it around into a happy ending.”
Schwarcz manages to convey the sense of being mired in the moment, of lacking past and future, that defines the state. “Those who suffer from depression live only in the moment,” he writes. “The verdict is always in the absolute and in present tense. Are we depressed or not?”
Schwarcz’s illness is a legacy handed down through the generations, trauma and biology combined. His father, a Hungarian Jew, was 19 in 1944 when he was loaded onto a cattle car bound for Bergen-Belsen. His own father, riding in the same car, pushed him out with a single word: “Run!”
Schwarcz’s father survived; his grandfather did not. The survivor’s guilt Schwarcz’s father carried to Brazil — combined with underlying mental health issues — and his unhappy and abusive marriage affected his son deeply.
“My principal inheritance has always been guilt,” writes Schwarcz.
Music became an outlet and a passion. To this day, he regularly takes in classical concerts, and wrote this memoir while listening to Giacomo Puccini, learning only later that the composer himself suffered from bipolar disorder.
Later came hospitalization, self-harm, periods of mania and desolation. All the while, he maintained a reputation as dignified and introspective, collected the
London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award, attended the Nobel ceremony with Ishiguro, represented Brazil on the world stage and brought great literature into translation.
Schwarcz did not need to share this personal side of his story; he might have stayed deeply private and allowed the public image to stand unchallenged.
“Why? What are you thinking? Why do you want to do this?” he said his mother demanded when he described the project. He replied: “I think I will help others.” A friend in publishing said he should cut the chapter about violence; another objected to his sharing the sexual side
effects of his medication.
While Brazil is a country with a robust psychoanalytic culture — for those who can afford it
— as in so many places there remains a stigma surrounding mental illness. Solomon, whose own depression memoir, “Noonday Demon,” prompted a passionate reaction from many Brazilian readers, said there’s a distinction between publishing such a book in Brazil as a public figure and in the U.S., where “everyone from Brad Pitt on down is talking about how depressed they are all the time.”
There’s a greater reluctance in Brazil to discuss mental health publicly,
Schwarcz said, though he believes that is changing. He hears from readers, who tell him stories of facing prejudice in their own family, or of people refusing to read his book because they don’t accept the idea of mental illness.
The English title, “The Absent Moon” — loosely translated, the Portuguese original is “The Air That I Lack” — comes from a novel Schwarcz never finished, and was suggested by his U.S. editor, Scott Moyers.
“It captures the same sense of poetic simplicity,” he said. Schwarcz loved that it still conveyed a sense of negative space — or the perception thereof.