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Personal History 1998
14/07/09
Personal History, 1998. Graham, Katharine. New York: Vintage Books. (Paperback, 642 pages, $15.00)
Personal History is the Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography of Katharine Graham. There are many stories threading through the 80 years it covers. One is of the author's role with the Washington Post, from the time her father bought it at an auction in the 1930s through Mrs. Graham's tenure as primary owner and chairman of the Post.. She led the paper through several of its crises and its rise to preeminence. An equally dramatic story, and our focus, is the story of her husband, Phil Graham, whose life ended tragically in suicide.
This story, in one sense, is a familiar one: a bright, charming person, full of energy, who is stricken by periods of depression and periods of mania. But this story plays out at a highly visible level. Phil Graham, a top Harvard law school graduate, was a major player in the Washington political and financial scene. President Kennedy himself was the recipient of some of Mr. Graham's angry tirades and late-night calls—and he attended Mr. Graham's funeral. In that pre-lithium age, despite the family's wealth and connections, Mr. Graham did not receive what would be considered basic treatment today. The diagnosis of manic depression did not even surface until five years after the onset of his severe depression—a few weeks before his suicide.
In relating this painful story, Mrs. Graham manages both to convey her own distraught feelings of that time and to provide perspective gained from her present understanding of the illness. When his severe depression struck, starting suddenly with a night of weeping, Mr. Graham sank into months of severe depression, became housebound, and insisted that his wife stay with him at all times. Her conviction at the time, which she now views as counterproductive, was that she should not tell anyone (other than his doctor) of his condition. The reader can feel her exhaustion at the double effort of constantly talking to her husband and reassuring him, while at the same time making cover-up explanations to others about what was going on. During a later period, when her husband was manic, Mrs. Graham had to cope with the opposite problem: his irrational behavior became very public, and he left her to live with another woman. As the mania slipped into depression again, she agreed to take him back, and she and their friends rallied around to help him.
The reviewers of Personal History have uniformly praised the book, using such phrases as "disarmingly candid and immensely readable" (Time) and "riveting, moving" (New York Times), and it has been a bestseller.
Mrs. Graham has said that she included painful descriptions of her husband's illness to increase the public's understanding of manic depression. She has succeeded. She has brought a vivid, moving description of manic depression, and its impact, to thousands of readers—many of whom undoubtedly have had no previous of knowledge of the illness.
Ed. notes: Personal History can be purchased from DRADA. Order form.
by Delphine Peck
DRADA Book Committee.
Smooth Sailing: Spring 1998
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