Things That Helped

On Postpartum Depression

By: Jessica Friedmann

Narrated by: Shiromi Arserio

Things That Helped is a memoir in essays, detailing the Australian writer Jessica Friedmann's recovery from postpartum depression. In each essay, she focuses on a separate totemic object - from pho to red lips to the musician Anohni - to tell a story that is both deeply personal and culturally resonant. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and her own experience, Friedmann's wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness. Occasionally confrontational but always powerfully moving and beautifully observed, Things That Helped charts her return into the world: a slow and complex process of reassembling what depression fractured and sometimes broke.

©2017 Jessica Friedmann (P)2018 HighBridge Company

White guilt memoir. Not postpartum.

This is not a book about PPD. It’s a book for and about white people who want to agonize about privilege and race and shame — and not even eloquently.