About this item
Highlights
- Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase while others, hunched over a keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing?
- Author(s): Alice Weaver Flaherty
- 307 Pages
- Language + Art + Disciplines, Writing
Description
About the Book
Neurologist Flaherty explores the drive to write, what sparks it, and what extinguishes it. She offers a brave and compelling account of the role of emotion and the ways in which neurological and mood disorders can lead to meager--or prodigious--creative output.Book Synopsis
Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase while others, hunched over a keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease, neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the mysteries of literary creativity: the drive to write, what sparks it, and what extinguishes it. She draws on intriguing examples from medical case studies and from the lives of writers, from Franz Kafka to Anne Lamott, from Sylvia Plath to Stephen King. Flaherty, who herself has grappled with episodes of compulsive writing and block, also offers a compelling personal account of her own experiences with these conditions.
Review Quotes
"[Flaherty] is the real thing . . . and her writing magically transforms her own tragedies into something strange and whimsical almost, almost funny.
The Washington Post