Flaherty, Alice W.: The Midnight Disease
The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
Writer: Alice W. Flaherty
Genre: Writing/Psychology/Science
Pages: 307
FINALLY!!! I'M DONE!!!
No, I'm not relieved to be done with this book at all. Why ever would you think otherwise?
I have to say, of all the books I cherry-picked for my writer's block/procrastination module, I was really excited about this one. Cool cover aside, everything I read about it told me that this book with be IT, and I'd get lots and lots of stuff for my module out of this text.
Then I noticed that despite its length (there's only 266 pages of text), the text itself is packed tight. So I realized that this book might read longer than its 266 pages imply. And boy did it ever. It wouldn't have been so bad if this book had been the IT I was hoping for, but it wasn't, and boy, was it sludge.
Here's where I have to be really honest about how my expectations colored my perceptions of the book. Because it wasn't what I was looking for, I began reading with more of a cynical eye, and I found myself composing rants in which I accuse the author of imitative fallacy (you can do this in non-fiction, who knew?). I had to step back. I can't tell you how successful this book is in terms of what it AIMS to do. I can only say how successful it was for me based on MY expectations. It might be a bright and shining jewel of a book for someone who's looking for some serious science (yes, SCIENCE: psychology and neurology combined, here) behind what makes us write. Flaherty examines how the urge to write has been linked to serious mental illnesses and she attempts to locate just why we write to begin with, all based on different regions in the brain and what happens if said regions are damaged. She doesn't claim that all writers suffer from mental illness either, but she uses studies from mental illness to try and relate to writers who are sane. It's interesting stuff, and the book's not completely without merit. She also talks about the known illnesses of rather famous writers like Dostoevsky and Flaubert and how their illness influenced their work, and that's fascinating stuff: if you want to reduce creativity to every single chemical, synapse, and region of the brain. Flaherty goes as far as to tackle how the inspiration to write--the muse--is biochemically similar to what happens in the brain during religious experiences and/or drug-induced states.
Again, it's interesting stuff. But don't read this book without knowing what you're getting into. I felt like this book talked and talked and TALKED about all kinds of things, but I was so disconnected from the text that I don't felt like I learned anything at all. Flaherty, and if she doesn't admit it, she comes close, seems to have written this book as a means to explore the "reasons" behind her own obsession with the craft, so in some ways, this is 10% memoir, hence why I slapped the "imitative fallacy" label on it earlier. Normally, I like it when writers in non-fiction share real-life experiences, but this books smells like agenda, even if the agenda is purely selfish on the author's part for wanting to find the cause behind her own "mania" and also use this book as a kind of therapy (after all, writing IS therapy for some people, and that's fine).
It must be doing something right, since it's so highly praised, but it didn't hit the right chord with me, and I can't say for sure if that's because it's due to my misplaced expectations or some obvious flaw in the book. I can say with reasonable objectivity that I feel Flaherty tackled too many subjects, and didn't do a good enough job relating the science behind it all to NORMAL writers. She kept talking about the greats and those who have a documented (or could have been documented had documentation been around at the time) illness, but never the "normal" writer who has no history of mental illness but sometimes experiences the same "symptoms" as those who do.
My Rating
Wish I'd Borrowed It: Obviously. But the really sad thing is that I'm not sure I'll ever want to touch this book again, even with a different POV. It's sad because stuff like this usually fascinates me: I eat it up. I loved The God Gene, and it essentially does the same thing: deconstructs something sacred to most people and puts it into the perspective of science. But unlike Hamer's work, Flaherty's isn't nearly as readable to me, but it may be my own fault for not being on the same level of terminology that she is.
Next up (which I've already started reading because I could NOT make myself read Flaherty's book this past weekend): Acacia: Book One: The War with the Mein by David Anthony Durham