The Devil Within by Stephanie Merritt

In the vocabulary of novelist and journalist Stephanie Merritt, however, the term regains some of its original value: chapter one of her memoir of depression, The Devil Within, finds 17-year-old Stephanie preparing, in a pleasant sitting-room in the Home Counties, to battle an actual demon. Or rather, to become the battleground over which her local exorcist, Roger Morrison, clad in Pringle sweater and "tiny round glasses ...

that perched on the end of his nose like a Womble's", will engage in combat with the demon that is thought to have possessed her.

"Demons, it seemed," Merritt notes, "were like an infestation of mice; they needed to be flushed out and their point of entry firmly boarded up." The tragi-comic extremity of Merritt's situation in the Morrisons' front room is preceded in her narrative by one even more dire when, 12 years after her exorcism, she finds herself crouching by the door of the commuter train taking her from her work in London to where her parents are waiting for her to pick up her son, bracing herself to jump to her death on the track below.

The Devil Within traces the progression of Merritt's "soft" — that is, non-psychotic — bipolar disorder from its beginnings in early adolescence, when she was horribly bullied at school, through her undergraduate years at Cambridge and afterwards when, having established a successful career she found herself pregnant, abandoned and back in the village from which, post-exorcism, she had escaped.

Merritt is an elegant, stoical and informative observer of her own predicament, with an admirable line in grim comedy. She writes generously of her parents and of the evangelical faith in which she was raised and which she later while retaining some of its teaching. She is notably temperate in her of a mental healthcare that demands florid signs of before offering There are moments, particularly the passages describing her when her son was an when one wishes she was balanced, more furious. But is a dangerous thing to wish a person who describes herself living like " someone who has a house on a notorious so perhaps one should that this is a brave and graceful of what it is like to live a faultline, and that is almost Only she never does get to telling us what actually during her exorcism..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

'I was nearly twenty before I understood that there was a name for what sometimes happened to me. Later, I learned that it has gone by many names - the black dog, the bell jar, the noonday demon, darkness visible, malignant sadness - but in my teens I'd just assumed that my fierce highs and days of disproportionate, isolating despair were part of every teenager's repertoire - how else would Morrissey have sold so many records? These pitches in mood were something I didn't speak about to anyone, because I was afraid of two things - either that it was nothing serious, and I would be told to pull myself together, or that it was serious, and I would be told that, yes, I was a mental case.'Stephanie Merritt has a career as a novelist and journalist, a beautiful son and a supportive family. Why then did she want to kill herself at the age of 29? Why could no one, neither the system of GPs and health professionals, nor her closest family and friends help her? Reading like a hybrid of Elizabeth Wurtzel's "Prozac Nation" and Rachel Cusk's more sober "A Life's Work", Stephanie's unflinchingly honest memoir explores areas of experience commonly associated with depression such as love, solitude and self-medication through the prism of her own experience. Beautifully written and intensely honest this is an extraordinarily moving, life-affirming book about a debilitating illness that affects one in six people in the UK alone.