# Mockingbird Years

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/emily-gordon/mockingbird-years

![Mockingbird Years](https://quivercdn.com/covers/basic-books/emily-gordon/mockingbird-years_978-04-6502-728-6.png?v=2026-05-13%2022%3A47%3A50)

- Authors: [Emily Gordon](https://www.bookquiver.com/emily-gordon)
- Language: en_GB
- Published: 2001-04-07

## Description

" During my years as a patient, I felt a guilty and unshakeable conviction that I was completely sane. Of course, my notion that patients were expected to be crazy was a naïve one, but I had swallowed whole the ideology that connects madness to beauty of spirit. In fact, I wasn't interested in being happier, but in growing more poignantly, becomingly, meaningfully unhappy." Here, in her own words, is Emily Fox Gordon, therapy veteran, sometime mental patient, and a Prize-winning essayist whose writing Rosellen Brown has praised as " acute and engaging, a combination of wit, rigor and deep feeling." In this astounding memoir, she tells the story of her " therapeutic education," marked by no fewer than five therapists before she turned seventeen. At eighteen, after a half-hearted suicide attempt, Gordon, mired in adolescent angst, began a three-year sojourn at the prestigious Austen Riggs sanitarium. It was at Riggs that Gordon was " rescued" by the maverick psychoanalyst Leslie Farber. Beautifully crafted, and startling in its observations of the therapeutic enterprise, Mockingbird Years is an auspicious debut by a major new talent.

## Editions

### Mockingbird Years

- Publisher: basic_books
- ISBN: 978-04-6502-728-6
- Pages: 1
- Published: 2001-04-07
- Language: en_GB