 I've done a great deal of talking recently about this book itself and about the experience of depression and the way that people get through their depression and this evening the subject is the writing life. So while I'll dwell a little bit on depression, which is after all an integral part of the writing life, I will attempt to look at some broader issues and questions as well. At the moment, I'm finding that the writing life involves things like the National Book Foundation Gold Medal Tour, something the title of which makes one feel like Whitney Houston. And so it hasn't involved a great deal of a great deal of writing really recently. Nonetheless, my objective in becoming a writer originally was to write and a certain connectedness to writing does obtain despite these various transformations of daily activity. That being said, it's been an extraordinary experience publishing this particular book. And part of what I had not really taken on board before I did so was that the intimacies that are expressed in these pages, the moments of self-revelation, which though I think they form a fairly limited part of the book seem to have reached a lot of people, bring about a kind of reciprocal intimacy on a vast scale for which I was very ill-prepared, which is to say that as I have toured around the country, I find that I give readings and that at the end of other people's readings, people come up and say, oh, hi, my name is Bob. That was great. And someone signs a book and they go on. At the end of mine, people tend to come up and say, my name is Bob. And I say, hi, Bob. And Bob says, what do you think about Busebar? And I say, it's a fine medication, Bob. Are you taking Busebar? And we proceed from there. And so in the end, I've learned a great deal about the inner mental life of people across America. And while some of the time that's been overwhelming and some of the time it's possible to be flip about it and address a certain comical aspect to it, by and large, my experience of it has been that it's actually a very touching and poignant experience to realize that you have released people who in many instances have been quite secretive or lacking for words to describe their emotional states into these acts of expression and these acts of intimacy. And I think that the first thing one needs to say about writing is that while it is in some sense a solitary activity, it is in its essence a communicative activity, one that people undertake with a view to reaching other people. And this whole process of touring with a book like this one has been exhilarating in that one is constantly exposed to the people one has reached. So much of the time when you write books, they go out into the world and you feel rather abandoned by them. They're off having experiences with people and you aren't. But in this instance, there was quite a lot of that kind of intimacy. And that has been a very thrilling thing. I feel I should begin by saying that I love the writing life and have always loved the writing life, partly because I love writing. I am interested by and engaged with language and with ways of expressing things. Also, I think I'm probably a rather controlling person. And while it's impossible to control much of one's professional life and unattractive to try to control other people, it's quite possible to control and to structure a book that one writes or even in many instances long journalistic piece of the kind that I've sometimes done. And there's something very gratifying about bringing order to one's experiences which are so often chaotic or one's insights which so often don't have any clear focus. And so that has been a constant pleasure. And then one also I think has to comment on the fact that the writing life allows you to sleep very late and to work intensely when you feel inspired and not that much when you feel not inspired and to bring about all kinds of other pleasurable balances of this kind. I'm going to tell a few anecdotes as ways of illuminating what has always appealed to me in the writing life, part of which has always been the openness that these journalistic enterprises, and as Neil indicated, I've written both fiction and nonfiction. But that these nonfiction enterprises have given me to lives and to worlds with which I might not otherwise have the chance for any meaningful contact. And I am always astonished by how much people will say to someone who is a writer and who is writing. And by the power there is simply in the interest of a writer in any particular field of activity or enterprise so that one is constantly being exposed really to the hearts of people. Not quite in the same way that I have been on this particular tour, but as a matter of course. The first book that I wrote was about some Russian artists. And I had up until I came up with the idea for that book, imagine myself essentially a writer of fiction who was doing some journalism to keep body and soul together. And then I went to Moscow in the late 80s when I was just fresh out of graduate school. And I went there to write an article about how bad contemporary Russian art was and how there was this or Soviet art as one then called it. And how there was this ludicrous business going on of people trying to sell Russian art to Western arts. And they were hyping it up. And then I got there and actually met this circle of artists. And I felt as though I had come into an enchanted place that there was a life that was being led by these artists and insights they had and a relationship to their own experiences, both traumatic and profound, that was unlike anything I had previously encountered. And having always thought that it would be lovely to write lots of novels that I made up completely in my head, I suddenly thought what an extraordinary privilege it was to be able to enter into this other world and to take on board at some level the idea of completely other and alien ways of living and thinking. And so I found myself in short order living in a squad on the outskirts of Moscow with a group of Soviet avant-garde artists. And it was a great shift from the life that I had known until then in school, mostly in England and America. And so there was this wonderful feeling of adventure, but that was in some ways a more contained adventure. It was quite a specific group of people and quite a specific experience that I had. And I was doing just that one. And then as time has gone on, I think my fields of inquiry and fields of enterprise have continually broadened. I've just, as some of you will know, returned from Afghanistan where I was doing some reporting for the New York Times on cultural resurgence in Afghanistan. I went there simply having read the Western media and thinking that it could not be the case that this entire nation in which such extraordinary things had happened over such a protracted history was people exclusively with warlike peasants and incompetent bureaucrats and evil clerics. And I wanted to go and dig up whatever other kinds of intelligentsia there were there, in part because I was curious to see what they were doing. And in part because I felt that American policy in Afghanistan has been determined to some large extent by an image of the country which is not accurate and which is actually not very complementary or very attractive. And I wondered whether there wasn't more to Afghanistan and whether in revealing the essential quality of the country and talking about the areas in which we might identify with individual Afghans I would shift a little bit of humanism into policies which seemed to me in many instances to be somewhat brutal and somewhat irresponsible, though I suppose in their way reasonably well intended. And I had an extraordinary time there. What I found in fact was that there was a large world of musicians and artists and poets and filmmakers and other people of similar stripe who were living in Kabul that they had some kind of a coherent life and that they had very strong views on the whole experience of the last few years. By and large they were very grateful to America for liberating them from the Taliban. And my understanding of September 11th I think was radically shifted when one of them said to me, you know, 3,000 Americans died so that 26 million Afghans could be freed from the yoke of tyranny. And I had of course thought of September 11th not only as grim and bleak but also as having absolutely no benefit or upside of any kind. And while these people all said it was horrifying to them and they wished it had never happened, there was nonetheless the sense that there was something that had come out of it that was rich and that was meaningful. And I suppose in examining that idea and looking at the kinds of cultural efflorescence that there have been in Afghanistan recently in a period when people have been trying to recapture not to move forward into an imagined future but to recapture those parts of the past that the Taliban was engaged in destroying altogether. I really felt that I was touching on the persistent theme I think of my own work which is the relationship between painful, traumatic, terrible experiences and some form of profound enrichment. I started off to write about depression struck by the general observation that I had met people who seemed to have what sounded as they talked about it like rather mild and not symptomatically particularly severe depression who nonetheless seem to be completely disabled by that depression so that it was the only truth and reality that they actually had. And if you said to them who are you they would say I am a person who has suffered depression. And then I met other people who had much more acute and much more terrible depression and who seemed despite having horrifying symptoms and going through agonizing treatments of one kind and another ultimately to be able to rise above the occasion of their own illness. And if you said to them who are you would say all kinds of things among which was the fact of depression. But that did not dominate and was not the primary motif. And I tried to understand what the relationship was between personality and illness and what the nature was of this kind of resilience. And as I as I launched into this exploration what I really found was that some people who have been depressed tend to think that was a bleak terrible useless thing that happened and I want never to think about it again and I will never look at it and I will have nothing further to do with it. And those are the people who ironically are in fact most haunted by what they've been through and least able to achieve any real escape from it. There's always bitterness and anger in connection with the losses that they've known. And there is additionally a sense of disruption and lack of fluidity in their own lives which gives them I think a perpetual internal chaos that's very difficult to endure. At the same time I found that some of the people who had made a more successful adjustment to depression were people who had looked into the depression and said okay I would not have chosen this. No one would ever have chosen this. But given that I was stuck with it what are the things in it that actually I would not have known in life without it that have some value. What kind of compassion could I perhaps have learned from it? What has it meant to me to experience emotions so overpowering? What is my relationship to human pain in the wake of my own sudden access of pain? And what are the kinds of strength to be drawn from this? And those were the stories that were really compelling to me. I wanted to avoid writing any of what seemed to me to be the prevalent kinds of book about depression which is to say I did not want to write a dry medical text. I did not want to write a personal memoir that had no particular connection to anyone else's experience at all. And I did not want to write a self-help book and in striving against the model of the self-help book I realized that self-help books are always the story of typical people. Neil had been having a rough time for several weeks when and it sort of goes on from there. And I did not want to write about typical people for two reasons really. The first is that they don't exist and the second is that they're incredibly boring and I wanted instead to try to write about extraordinary people and the way that extraordinary people had accommodated this illness and the difficulties that it poses. So I really had that idea and I think in retrospect that it's what I've been writing about all along. It was what I was writing about in talking about these Soviet artists and the various difficulties and punishments that they had endured throughout the Soviet period and talking about the way that they had emerged from them. And though my novel is a work of fiction with some autobiographical content really what it's about is somebody who is going through a variety of traumas and then emerges from them possibly with greater self-knowledge and a richer experience of the world in consequence of that. I'm going to describe for a moment the sort of apotheosis of my Russian experiences which came unfortunately after I had finished the Russian book. The best experiences always do and are therefore never in. The books one writes and one always thinks well the next book I write about Russian artists this will definitely have to feature and then one moves on to subsequent topics. But I had finished that book and published it and I very much wanted to go back to Russia. It was at a time when unbeknownst to me I was beginning to accumulate the material for the noonday demon in the form of a burgeoning depression. But I didn't quite recognize what was going on at the time and so I went back to Russia to see the many friends I had made in the course of writing the irony tower and to see what had happened to them and to see what kind of relationship I would have with them when I was no longer the writer who was going to be constructing their narrative but rather just a person they knew and with whom they had been through a great deal. And I went to Moscow and I thought it would be very relaxing to be there under these circumstances. I had no work obligations and some of the people I knew had taken a dacha for the summer and it was a bit primitive but I thought I'd be out in the woods and I'd go swimming and it would all be really fantastic. And I got there in August of 1991 at the beginning of the month and some of you may remember that that was the month that actually the Soviet Union collapsed and was there for not a relaxing time to be in Moscow. In fact a few days after I arrived the I was asleep quite happily and the telephone rang and I answered it and someone I'd known for a long time who was always given to hysteria said to me I have to cancel dinner tonight and I said well okay Vika if you have to cancel dinner and she said no it's a it's terrible situation but there are there is collapse of government and tanks in streets and I said Vika if you have to cancel dinner just cancel dinner and we don't need this kind of not and so I then went back to bed and at that point in Moscow there was always something going on that was political and that seemed out of control and in fact someone else I know had had a call from from his elderly mother who said the government is collapsing and he had similarly said to her mom it's nine o'clock in the morning what are you doing on the telephone you know I'm not up at this hour and then when I did get up a few hours later I discovered that in fact there had been the famous push and that the powers that be had taken over control of the Kremlin and that there was now a return to right-wing government in Russia on what was to prove a temporary basis but of course one didn't know that then and I was quite startled as I brushed my teeth and looked out the window and noticed tanks rolling down the street unaccustomed as I was to columns of tanks outside my window at that time and so there was a sort of extraordinary moment in which I had to decide whether I was going to leave as most foreigners who were in Russia at that point did or whether I was going to stay and I felt as though the artists I had written about had vouchsafed their personal stories to me and told me a lot of things which had been complex and painful and I had been their guest in many ways for two and a half years and I felt that I owed them a great debt of loyalty and I sort of thought about it briefly and then I thought no if they're all going to go through this then I suppose I'll stay and go through it with them and we had a number of extraordinary adventures over the days that followed the artists and intellectuals of Russia were the ones who were really primarily responsible for building the barricades and for creating the protests outside of the Russian Parliament building where Yeltsin ultimately came in on a tank and then rose on to power but as in any situation of great drama part of what was compelling was the hilarity I remember on the first day that we were out and we were trying to build these barricades which we were building with whatever construction material came to hand and there was a woman who had managed to jumpstart a large crane that she didn't really know how to operate so the arms of it were swinging kind of wildly and she was trying to get this thing operating to and she was yelling orders at a lot of other people she was a kind of self appointed in-charge person and it was raining and she was in the midst of this and often I think people wear t-shirts especially in alphabets that aren't their own alphabet without knowing what the t-shirts say and she was wearing one that said I'd rather be playing tennis so she was sort of busy doing her construction and various other extraordinary things happen but the story that I'm building up to perhaps to gradually here is that on the third day of the push I was standing outside of the Russian Parliament building with several of these artists and there wasn't anything very much happening and someone said oh we should go up to Smolenskaya and look at where those people got killed last night that was the site where two people who were the only casualties in fact of this whole episode had been killed and we went up there and the scene was very Russian there were a lot of sort of old women standing around and talking about tragedy and there were flowers strewn on the ground and everyone was being sort of mauled in and so we sort of stood around there and chatted with various people and then quite suddenly a young man who looked sort of like the student from a check-off play or like a kind of early Marxist revolutionary with wire rim glasses and a tweed cap clutched in his hand came rushing up and he said there are tanks approaching the barricades and we were near the outer limit of the rings of barricades that had been being constructed there are tanks approaching the barricades who have to come to the front and help to defend the barricades and at that point the tanks had kept approaching the barricades and they kept parking across the street and so none of us really took it very seriously but we all wandered up to the front line of the barricades and we sort of arranged ourselves in front of them holding hands rather like that and slightly to everyone's surprise a column of tanks did in fact roll up and they stopped very near us and they're very big tanks and these were Soviet tanks which really if you'd had an American childhood you had grown up dreading and I thought to myself as I looked up at them there that this was this was not how I'd imagined the life of an art critic and which was what I styled myself then and the soldier on the front tank looked down at us and said listen we've had unconditional orders to destroy this barricade and if you'll move out of the way then there doesn't need to be any confrontation here and we can just plow it down but if you won't move out of the way we're gonna have no choice but to run you down so please don't make trouble and just get out of the way and the artists who I was with looked up at him and one of them said give us just a minute to tell you why we're here and it being Russia he actually stopped at that suggestion and looked down quizzically and we were a rather small group of people maybe 30 or 35 people all of us had been awake for the previous two nights through the events of the porch we were all incredibly exhausted it was raining it had been raining the whole time we had been standing around in the rain we were unbelievably bedraggled even by Soviet standards and we were all beginning to come down with the flu and sort of sneezing away and there were these these tanks and the artists who I was with began talking about the idea of freedom and they said you don't really understand what the new government that you are working for means you're very young and you perhaps don't remember what it's like to live in a totalitarian regime let us tell you what that's like and they said you know a life without freedom is a life without meaning and they had a kind of Jeffersonian ability that I think would not have been possible for an American who had grown up with the habits of freedom but that was certainly available to these people who had grown up with an ideal of freedom in the face of the absence of freedom a Jeffersonian ability to conjure why democracy and why however dysfunctional why democracy and why the the basic liberalization that had been going on under Gorbachev were actually right and why Stalinism and this move back to a neo-Stalinistic regime was actually wrong and I remember standing there and listening to these extraordinary monologues and thinking all their lives they've prepared for this moment all their lives they prepared for making this announcement of what freedom is this is all that they've thought about for such a long time and everyone spoke their little piece and finally silence fell and everyone had said everything and the soldier on the front tank sort of looked at us for a while and then he looked back at the soldiers on the other tanks and then he looked at us again and he said I think what you have said is true and that we must bow to the will of the people and so if you'll step back a little bit so that we can have enough space to make U-turns then we will leave your barricade in place where it is and we all stepped back and these tanks sort of slowly it's quite complicated making a U-turn if you're a tank these tanks that have came up and they turned around and they went away and it was the first group of tanks that had explicitly defied orders from the Kremlin in this whole putch and by the end of that day actually the coup had fallen what I took from this whole experience was that the ability to express certain ideals the ability to give voice to things which many many people actually knew in their heart to be true but which most people weren't able to lay out in a lucid or rational way actually could bring about enormous physical political social change in a way that had always been my fantasy and I felt it always been a slightly adolescence and perhaps slightly affected fantasy this idea that if you could just write things well enough it would change the world and these people in articulating things well enough in their small way I mean I think the putch would have fallen even without this particular it certainly would have fallen even without this particular episode but in their small way we're bringing about that kind of change and transformation and I remember standing there and thinking and it was extraordinary and the tanks sort of drove off and people were embracing each other and people were weeping and people who I didn't know we're saying oh you're an American and you came and stood here with us and I felt I had really done nothing I had stood there kind of wet and I was definitely prepared to jump aside the minute the tanks actually came forward but there was this feeling that language and the expression of these ideas through language had actually caused this enormous shift in people's behavior and I suppose that that's been the most gratifying thing also about publishing this book on depression is that I've had a certain number of letters from people who've said in the most dramatic instances one man wrote to me and said I was planning to commit suicide and then I read your book and I've gone to get help instead and I'm feeling much better and I'm very glad to be alive and though I think that there are rare instances in which things are so explicit I stuck I think always with that idea not only in nonfiction but also in fiction that articulating things is a way of liberating people and of liberating people from certain kinds of difficulty and trauma so that is my that is my grand take on the writer's life and it's why in a way some people have said to me is doing all of this touring driving you crazy and doing all this touring would drive anyone crazy it really is a very exhausting process in some ways but it's also quite exciting to connect with the people on whom one has perhaps had some small influence for the good and in that influence found meaning in the very act of writing and an occasion for doing it so I had had in mind possibly to do something flip and amusing when I got up here this evening and I've ended up doing something rather serious instead but I think that is the essence really of the writer's life and that though some writers like to deny it if one didn't have this very serious high agenda for writing one would never be able to muster the energy or the discipline to sit and write things at the sort of length and in some ways tedium that that process frequently entails so thank you very much there has been a suggestion that people might have questions so if anyone does I'm very happy to answer them yes I wrote a long piece about Afghanistan that was in the times about a month ago and I then ended up actually because life is life is comical also writing a piece about Afghanistan that's in the current issue of food and wine magazine because I arrived in Afghanistan expecting absolutely anything but also thinking that the food was going to be so horrible and disgusting and in fact Afghan food is delicious and there's quite a lot of it there and everybody eats very well but no the serious piece was in the Times magazine and I'm beginning a long project on memory which I think will ultimately be a book about memory and I want to write about the way in which a regime for political purposes tried to annihilate cultural memory and memory itself and what it's meant for people to try to reawaken memory particularly around something one of the artists I met said to me I looked at his work and I said you know your work is very beautiful he was a miniaturist I said but it's it's very conservative and it looks a lot like things people have been doing for a long time and I wonder if you don't think that it would be interesting to sort of try something a little bit new and he said oh you don't understand he said you come from a country in which the past is safe and so you have the leeway to try things that are new but in this country the past has so nearly been destroyed and we can't begin to think about doing anything new until we manage to save the things that were our tradition so I'm going to use that as a sort of jumping off point and writing about memory but the Times piece is out there yeah in the end I had a research assistant on this project and it's one of like so many of life's luxuries it's one of those things that one hadn't felt one needed until one had it and then when became very devoted to it and can't imagine living without it but essentially he went out and found things as I sort of thought about what I needed or what kinds of sources I wanted I did an enormous amount of talking to people there are hundreds of people I interviewed whose names don't appear in the book and whose material doesn't appear in the book and just a huge amount of reading I mean there's almost an infinite amount out there to read about depression but you quickly reach the point at which you can sort through much of it and the feeling initially which I'm having as I begin to think about writing a new book and it's very unpleasant is it a chaos to which no order can possibly be brought but if you keep battling at it eventually an order begins to emerge and I've said to people that though originally I wrote an article that was in the New Yorker which I did without a research assistant that was on the subject that was kind of the genesis for the book that it really took me about four years to write the table of contents and the first chapter and then once I figured out what my essential take was and how to divide up the material it took me about eight months to write the rest of the book think though the book appears to be so that's I wish I had some wonderful secret but chaos gradually giving way to order yes well the question is whether it's possible to look at the Sophia Putch of 91 as comedy I think it's easy to look at pretty much anything as comedy once it's resolved itself in a non-tragic form so I don't think it was comical as it was happening I think it was incredibly serious but yes I mean there's this kind of funny thing that I find goes on now that I'll see friends from that time and who are with me there and oh and then remember in 91 you had that terrible jacket you were wearing down at the parliament protests and you know it'll all be quite light and there's a kind of nostalgia that one has even for horror if that horror is part of one's own past and one of the Russians who I know actually has recently through a mutual friend in sort of elaborate circumstances been reunited with someone with whom he was in one of Stalin's prison camps and he was saying you know as we spoke about it he said it could have been you're talking about summer camp which was for me kind of a Stalinist experience but he said it could have been anyone talking about the pleasures of their past because the fact that something is in retrospect and is what happened and led to where you are now especially if you feel reasonably satisfied with where you are now is something that's always forgivable and always in a sense pleasurable and I found that with depression as well that people who have been through a depression and emerged from it and though depression is a cyclical illness and anyone who's been depressed has a strong chance of becoming depressed again anyone who's been through a depression and emerged from it is likely to have a kind of funny nostalgia about it as well and often to see that it is comical I mean it's perfectly ridiculous to be unable to get out of bed and tie your shoes and when you're able to get up and tie your shoes again you kind of look from time to time at your shoes and think you know wow I can't believe that was that was what I was sort of so hung up on and it does seem comical and you have you know a new relationship with your with your shoes so I think similarly people people do see a lot of comedy there and also I mean the Puch organizers were so incompetent and they I mean one can say that the Puch fell because of the ability of the Soviet people to articulate an ideal of freedom but it also fell because they didn't know what they were doing and they haven't thought it through very well and incompetence is always funny in retrospect yeah people ask me a lot about the difficulties of being public about depression and I didn't find it particularly difficult and I think there are a number of reasons for that one is that I think I was in a very supportive environment and I also I live in New York and I work as a writer and it takes some doing to find writers in New York who haven't ever had any sort of episode of depression so I didn't have the sense that I'd gone through something absolutely aberrant that people were going to be horrified by then I think I found the the process of keeping secrets very painful and very unpleasant and I felt that I had at one stage gone through a period of being closeted about sexuality and I found that extremely agonizing and it took a long time to pull through it and after I did and when I finally felt that I was not any longer being sort of closeted and secretive and trying to withhold information from the world I thought never again am I going to have a secret which is a major part of my life that I'm constantly hoping no one else will find out about I thought it just isn't worth it it's much more toxic than the honesty is and lots of people have come to me and it varies a lot regionally you know you're at a reading in San Francisco or New York and you talk about depression and people sort of raise their hand in the audience and say you know I've been taking this and it didn't work and I had ECT and then I you know I have this other problem and talk about it very openly and you give a reading in Milwaukee for example where I was a couple of weeks ago and at the end of the reading people come up to you and there are 90 people in line they've all got some relation to depression or they probably wouldn't be waiting in this particular line each of them comes up and sort of leans over and whispers to you I have this thing that's been there's an episode that to me sort of summed up the perils of giving into the stigma around depression which I do report in the book I was spending a weekend with some people some time ago in England and they found out that I had been working on this depression project and there was some sort of vague uncomfortable conversation and a woman came up to me on the first night of a weekend we were all spending together for various reasons and said listen I just I wanted to ask you some advice my I've actually had depression and I'm now taking she was taking well-butterned she said I'm now taking this medication and it seems to be kind of helpful but I wondered and she wanted to talk to me about various details and she said but please don't tell anyone she said I don't want anyone to know nobody knows she said and my husband really doesn't understand about emotions very well and so please don't say anything to him so I said okay that's fine and we sort of talked it through well on Sunday her husband took me aside and said you know my wife wouldn't really think I was much of a man if she knew about this so please don't tell anyone and certainly don't tell my wife but I've had this sort of battle with depression and I've been taking well-butterned and he went on from there and each of them had their little bottles of well-butterned hidden in different parts of the same bedroom and we're keeping it secret from each other and I thought what a lot of comfort there could be in this marriage between two people confronting the same demons if they confronted them together and what a lot of perilous isolation there is in fact in this marriage in which two people are holding onto these secrets from each other so on the other hand there is a leap between saying I will be open and tell everyone that I've had depression and talk a little bit about what it's like and going off and becoming a sort of poster child for depression and depression treatment and some of the time I wish I hadn't I mean some of the time I get overwhelmed not I think by people's knowledge of what's happened to me but again by the ways in which people respond to that knowledge and the dependence that I sometimes feel coming from people in response to it but I think that has to do with any kind of broad public statement on any major topic and is less about stigma and being secret of around depression. Gee, lots of you, yeah. Well that's an extremely interesting hypothetical question. I certainly found that when you're in the throes of a very severe depression you can't write. When you're in the throes of a very severe depression as I said you can't brush your teeth or put on your shoes and socks and so writing becomes certainly something that's totally inaccessible. I found and partly this is because I write we're here talking about the writing life it's what I do but I found as I began to emerge from that very lowest point that writing things down allowed me again to get a sense of having some kind of a grasp on them and so they became less frightening to me when I was able to record them. That was an extremely exhilarating process and sometimes when I say that people say to me oh, that's so great and then when you went to write the book you had all this terrific material and I say actually I had a lot of really unreadable and boring material was what I had. So the therapeutic aspect of writing though significant is I think distinct from the communicative and useful aspect of writing. So far as writing about things that are painful or that one does not want to write about you know, if you're feeling cheerful it's a little bit easier but no, I haven't found a medication that makes it really easy and there are still those moments even with small insignificant things I just had to review a really terrible book and I don't like writing really negative book reviews and I just sat there staring at the screen for hours thinking how am I going to address this in a way that's at least moderately respectful to a writer whose other writing I rather admire but at the same time convey that nobody should waste money by buying this book or time by reading it and I found myself sort of spending I'd ended up taking weeks to write a very short simple book review you know, I suppose if there were a medication that made that really easy it would be it would be exciting and I'm always game for a certain amount of chemical experimentation I think so I'd certainly give it a shot but I think that in fact and here I sort of repeat what I was saying earlier that part of part of what distinguishes writing and part of what makes the process satisfying is precisely that it's difficult and I always think of Lucretius's suggestion that the sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures and I think one of the things that has led to a lot of depression in our society in fact is an overemphasis on easy pleasures and a failure to seek out some of those more difficult pleasures I'd love writing to be easier some of the time but I think the process of experiencing difficulty in the course of doing it causes one to do it more seriously and ultimately probably conduces in some ways to better writing that being said there's writer's block you know out of control and anyone who could figure out how to knock that down I'd be glad to hear from the question is about how artists and writers in Russia are faring under Putin there isn't really much oppression of artists in an ironic way when there was intense oppression of artists the very fact that they were so oppressed meant that they were important it gives you a great sense of significance in a society if people want to send you off to prison camps for what you do what there is now is a kind of lack of interest in the production of writers and artists it's a very anti-intellectual regime in a country which historically has had its great intellectual strengths and so I think there's a kind of deadness that's set in which I think is unfortunate and I think there's a lot of production of stuff that can be sold and less a sense as the artists I knew originally had that by expressing things through art you could change the world and so on but I mean they're doing fine they're certainly living reasonable free lives some of them have been successful in the West as artists and therefore now live very comfortably in the West or sort of on Western earnings in Russia some of them have had a certain amount of success in Russia and some of them actually who had the greatest integrity as artists were working in a system in Russia in which what mattered was the moral content of what they did and as one of them said to me not so long ago he said I realized that we were in training in effect to be not artists but angels and that in a Western market economy which is the one where our artists now exhibited there's very little interest in angels and so he's become a restaurant critic instead so they're faring fine but some of them have sort of lost their purpose and their meaning I'm happy to go on with this I realize it's going on for a while so I hope none of you feel glued to your seats but yeah how am I feeling now? I'm feeling very well thank you I feel like depression is something which is treatable rather than something which is curable and there is eternally the issue of when there's going to be a recurrence and what that recurrence will be like but I think this whole process has given me a sense of what extraordinary stories of resilience there are in addition to which of course there are terrible stories of people destroyed by the illness and when I'm doing my depression talk rather than my writing life talk I try to emphasize that the rate of suicide has been shockingly high in America and people are very out of touch with that more young men fighting age committed suicide during the Vietnam War then died in Vietnam more men between the ages of 18 and 35 died of suicide at the height of the AIDS crisis then died of AIDS during that time so there are a lot of very discouraging statistics out there but this particular experience has been one of being exposed to a great deal of strength and I think that one never knows until one is in one's next depressive crisis that should I have a relapse I will be able to draw on these things that I've witnessed and to get through it reasonably well the fear of it is always there but I do feel that between medication and therapy and time and change in my life circumstances I feel quite free of depression at the moment but thank you for asking yes well I think I think it leads you back to the question yes I think that you know there is a consensus within the scientific and psychiatric community that at this point depression is not curable so if you've found a cure and people who are really cured put them in touch with the National Institute of Mental Health there will be a lot of hunger for them there I think that Mania is an extremely important issue I think schizophrenia is an extremely important issue I think there are many many issues that I wasn't able to deal with in writing this book and that depression was really enormous enough I did write at some length about the depressive phase of manic depressive illness and alluded in the course of doing that to Mania there are a number of books that have come out recently which are specifically about Mania there's one that was just published a few weeks ago called Electro Boy that's all about someone's experiences of Mania I think it's an incredibly important topic it just wasn't my topic right yeah well I think resilience in depression is a very complicated topic and I don't want to get into a sort of long exegesis on that I think that the essence of it really lies in doing not only the work of immediate recovery which is so often accomplished in this day and age through medication but also the work of trying to understand what the depression is and what has constituted it and where it came from and what the relationship is between biological and psychological factors in your own particular depression that essentially a great deal of introspection is necessary to have that essential resilience and most often I think that can be achieved by going through various kinds of psychodynamic therapy it seems clear to me for for example I sometimes say that if you are using a microscope you have a rough focus knob which you absolutely have to use or you won't have any idea what you're looking at and medication can be the rough focus knob but you won't actually achieve any of what you want to achieve with a microscope unless you also use the fine focus knob which brings in this precision and clarity and that precision and clarity are I think most often achieved through talking therapies or through other kinds of therapies outside of the physical interventions of medication and ECT and psychosurgery and so on and I think that lots of people achieve what seems to me to be a very partial cure or a very partial treatment in which they emerge part way from depression and then sort of stop part way along and that in fact it's necessary to go all the way and to continue to look at this until you've come to grips with it as profoundly as you can. I will take one more question and then I think I'm going to stop. Yes at the back. Well, I'd be glad to read a little bit of my book. I'll read the opening which is what I've sort of tended to read when asked to read aloud. Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes it degrades oneself and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love though it is no prophylactic against depression is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection making it easier to love and be loved and that is why they work. In good spirits, some love themselves and some love others and some love work and some love God. Any of these passions can furnish that vital sense of purpose that is the opposite of depression. Love forsakes us from time to time and we forsake love. In depression the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion the meaninglessness of life itself becomes self evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance. Life is fraught with sorrows. No matter what we do we will in the end die. We are each of us held in the solitude of an autonomous body. Time passes and what has been will never be again. Pain is the first experience of world helplessness and it never leaves us. We are angry about being ripped from the comfortable womb and as soon as that anger fades distress comes to take its place. Even those people whose faith promises them that this will all be different in the next world cannot help experiencing anguish in this one. Christ himself was the man of sorrows. We live however in a time of increasing palliatives. It is easier than ever to decide what to feel and what not to feel. There is less and less unpleasantness that is unavoidable in life for those with the means to avoid. But despite the enthusiastic claims of pharmaceutical science, depression cannot be wiped out so long as we are creatures conscious of our own selves. It cannot best be contained and containing is all that current treatments for depression aim to do. It gets a little less abstract as it goes along. Thank you all very much. Thank you.