Later, much later, 25 years later, when I had a full on crisis I learned about my brain and how life’s events and challenges wear away the little fingers that facilitate happiness and peace within the self. I know myself much better now; I am a happy person who suffers from bouts of depression. Perhaps you know what I mean. Depression has its own being, apart from life’s events and possibly even life’s objective realities. This is its disorienting power, the way it can pull the rug out from under.

I long resisted the idea that melancholy and the artistic temperament are related; I resisted the idea of there being an artistic temperament — but Kay Redfield Jamison’s book, Touched With Fire, put it clearly in front of me and showed me how to look at the pedigree of my own family.