The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Love. I loved this book. I loved the movie but the book was so much more. A short book, a short chapters book. It was perfect. You really get inside Pat's head and it sounds real, true and honest. It was great.
After going through a traumatic experience with his wife, Pat ends up in a mental institution to recover. He loses years of his life forgetting what is too painful to remember. He suffers from severe depression, delusion and anger. The book is his perspective and few letters between him and another. The book chronicles his recovery once he leaves the mental institution and the difficulties it causes his family and himself.
Yah there's LOTS of football talk. As someone who HATES football it honestly didn't really bother me. It was interesting to see how fanatical people can be about sports. Even in my most outrageous love for my Spurs I'm not like that.
What I loved about this book was it's honesty. Recovery from a mental illness is not immediate, it can't all be solved by medication and it can't all be solved by therapy. I believe in therapy and abhor overmedicating but understand that some people need both. The book was painful to read at times, because someone who is suffering from delusions can talk themselves into anything at certain times, you'll make excuses and make bets with yourself. You'll tell yourself if you just change yourself it'll be better and so hearing Pat's mind as he had these arguments and wagers with himself was hard. Because once you're on the other side you know that's not how it works. You have to do the work. If you keep deluding yourself it wont happen. It took Pat 5+ months in this book plus the 3 years he was institutionalized but that's because he wouldn't do the work.
I loved this book. It was so good. I own the movie, it was one of the first movies I saw by myself when I moved to college station and I remember it meant a lot to me then. The book does now too.
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