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Daphne Merkin

Biography

Daphne Merkin

Daphne Merkin is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and a regular contributor to ELLE. Her writing frequently appears in The New York Times, Bookforum, Departures, Travel + Leisure, W, Vogue, Tablet Magazine and other publications. Merkin has taught writing at the 92nd Street Y, Marymount College and Hunter College. Her previous books include ENCHANTMENT, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for best novel on a Jewish theme, and two collections of essays: DREAMING OF HITLER and THE FAME LUNCHES, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in New York City.

Photo Credit: © Tina Turnbow

Daphne Merkin

Books by Daphne Merkin

by Daphne Merkin - Memoir, Nonfiction

Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls “the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome.” In this dark yet vital memoir, Merkin describes not only the harrowing sorrow that she has known all her life, but also her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer.