The latest addition to my website is Almudena Sánchez‘ s Fármaco (Pharmakon). This is about Almudena Sánchez’s struggle with depression, which hit her in her early thirties. Unlike other novels/memoirs on depression, this is not a realist account of the depression. Rather it is a writer writing about her depression rather than a depressive giving an account of her depression. She does cover the usuaal themes: her childhood and her not always easy relationship with her mother, the possibility of suicide, the tears and the grief, her psychiatrist and the various (legal, medical)drugs she uses to control the depression. However she also veers off on to discussions of literature, famous depressives (Woolf, Churchill, Charlie Brown) and the issue, for her, of Catalan vs Spanish. Most importantly, this book is very readable even if at times poignant/sad.