Peter Michael Solstad

Dealing with Demons: Coping with Mental Illness Peter Michael Solstad

Dealing with Demons is a remarkable memoir of a marriage troubled by mental illness and spanning forty years and two worlds, of what it looked like, sounded like, smelled like, but most of all what it felt like, all carefully recounted by the one who suffered through its final, terrible act. Literature is replete with such accounts, their component parts, the good, the bad and the ugly; amateur psychoanalysis too often and unnecessarily pronounced with faux profundity. Haunted by nightmares; incidents attendant to this marriage and an overpowering sense of irrevocable loss, the author revisits and recounts events that would have driven others mad. In a moving moment informed by the pent up emotional drama of this forty-plus year saga, the author arrives at a profound understanding of the meaning of marriage and love so very different from his youthful expectation, agreeing finally and forever with those ancient words of wisdom and truth: "faith, hope, love, abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."