Exhibitionist 1 journal, 1 depression, 100 paintings

Novelist and graphic designer Mendelsund (Weepers) blends memoir and visual art in this striking account. Toward the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mendelsund and his family visited an isolated New Hampshire farmhouse, where Mendelsund tried painting for the first time as his despair about the state of the world spiraled into suicidal depression. In short, percussive micro-chapters ("Unpacked. Searched the property. Sat on the porch steps"), he captures both the drudgery of his condition and the ways art helped alleviate it. Along the way, he reflects on his artist father's life and death, his younger years as a classical musician, and the wisdom he's gleaned from writers including James Joyce and Roland Barthes. Particularly memorable are passages in which Mendelsund details the inspiration for his paintings, including one inspired by his late grandfather's fur coat ("It is facile to say that whenever I see a certain shade of brown, I think of him. Even if it is true"). The paintings themselves, which mostly appear in full-page photographs, range from claustrophobic and harrowing to playfully naive. Witty, inspiring, and endearingly unpolished, this chronicle of a creative mind learning to heal itself will enchant artists of all stripes. Photos. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Co. (June)

How painting can save your life. Celebrated book designer, nonfiction author (Cover, 2014, etc.), novelist (The Delivery, 2021, etc.), and now painter, Mendelsund recounts his struggle with depression in a journal that begins early in the Covid-19 pandemic and ends two years and some 100 new paintings later. At the outset of the pandemic and already suffering from serious depression, Mendelsund retreated with his family to a New Hampshire farmhouse where he began to paint for the first time in his life. The book's opening lines cleanly telegraph the story to come: "Rain on the drive. The undersides of the leaves were bright. Coming up the road, the barn was the first thing I saw. Large, almost black; presiding over a farmhouse, shed, a murky pond, and a large, untended field that stretched off and off." There is the looming darkness, along with the faintest glimmer of light. Painting, it turns out, will offer that light. Mendelsund's short, staccato chapters and clipped sentences feel like the exhaustion of depression and space for what can't be expressed in words, just as a barn studio makes space for art-making and recovery. Though reminiscent of Anne Truitt's published journals (Yield, 2022, etc.), which grapple with art-making and life, and William Styron's memoir of depression,Darkness Visible (1990), Mendelsund's book is singular in its quiet wit: "A sky so blue it came across as aggressively middlebrow. This depressed me further." His humor, along with full-color reproductions of his startlingly good paintings, is solace from his sadness, both for the author and reader. He makes these paintings left-handed, sometimes under the influence. "My diligence in maintaining my incompetence has paid off. I have said my final fuck-you to expertise. Amazing." And it is amazing. A kind of alchemical miracle: dilettante into artist, depression into creation, something slapdash into something wonderful. A wry and fearless portrait of depression, and the strange solace of art-making in middle age. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.