Binnie Kirshenbaum

“People who are not easy to like have feelings just like nice people do.”

Bunny is not easy to like. An erstwhile novelist in the grip of a profound clinical depression, she has little patience for social niceties and superficial people. Unfortunately, she is surrounded by them. When a disturbing incident at a New Year’s Eve dinner party lands her in a psychiatric unit, she copes as best she can, by writing her sardonic observations on her legal pad and making alliances (not actually friendships) with a ragtag bunch of fellow patients. She wants nothing more than to go home to her devoted husband Albie and cat Jeffery, but to do so she’ll have to give in to the doctors’ insistence that she cooperate with them. What will she do?

I imagine that how much you will like this book depends on the extent to which you can understand the main character. Bunny is sharp-tongued, unhygienic, and self-absorbed, a misfit in her family and in most social groups. She cries a lot too.

I liked this book so much I finished it in two days and wished there were more of it.… (mer)