MEMOIR: Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: A MemoirBy Lorna Martin John Murray, 311pp. £14.99.
LORNA MARTIN was 35 years of age when she decided she was "distinctly losing the plot". Encouraged by her sister, Louise, and her best friend, Katy, both of whom happen to be therapists, she signed up for a year of psychotherapy, taking out a fat bank loan to finance the venture. Martin is a journalist for the Observer, and it was the newspaper that set the ball rolling when it commissioned her to write a once-off article about her first session on the couch. This in turn led to Grazia magazine offering her a weekly column entitled "Conversations with My Therapist". Now comes the memoir, Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdownwhich, in essence, is a reworking of the columns together with a full and frank account of backstage events during her time in therapy.
Let's start by getting this much straight - Lorna Martin was never on the verge of anything that even comes close to a nervous breakdown. To claim such a thing demeans the countless unfortunates who have had to wrestle with that particular black dog. What she did go through was a rough patch in her personal life, and, as would increasingly seem to be the case, women of a certain age are no longer prepared to put up with rough patches. Not women like Lorna Martin anyhow.
Martin assures us that she has always been a "therapy sceptic" - so, what drove her to change her mind? Not a lot, it would seem. She had been overloading her schedule, arriving late for meetings, missing a few flights - not unexpected when you're commuting from Glasgow to London via budget airlines. She had made a few stupid decisions, one of which had resulted in a close shave with a drunken taxi driver in Thailand - but so what? Any backpacker worth his/her salt could match or indeed better this story without having to run off to therapy. She did, however, find herself crying a lot, often in public. The reason for all this crying? Well, a man, of course. (For this, for this, did the suffragettes chain themselves to the railings.)
This man was married, and had been a sort of lover, or at least she was mad about him even if he didn't seem too keen. In any case, he dumped her for someone younger thus demoting her to the role of other other woman. Martin became obsessed by this humiliation, and between the missed flights and what have you, it all became too much to bear.
And so, armed with the results of an internet questionnaire, which somehow confirmed she was suffering from clinical depression, she took herself off to the GP He concurred and quickly passed her on to a psychotherapist.
We are not told if these professionals thought to ask if this public sobbing, or should I say public house sobbing (as this is where it usually occurred) had anything to do with alcohol or some other factor; hormones perhaps, or even a tendency to whinge when overcome with emotion. Anyway, if sobbing over a man when half-cut in a public bar constitutes clinical depression, well . . .
The psychotherapy sessions commence and the reader becomes the fly on the wall. Before very long, it's pretty clear Martin really has nothing to moan about. Her past is dipped into, the bottom of its barrel duly scraped, and still nothing emerges that a good kick up the you-know-what wouldn't cure. Her parents are sound and steady. Her sister is a dream. Not one to be deterred, Martin digs on and eventually manages to excavate two isolated incidents. The first of these concerns a rather brutal dose of corporal punishment when she was five years old. Martin, along with eight other children in her class, was slapped with a ruler until her knuckles bled. The second trauma occurred when Martin was 15 and her sister, Louise, had surgery to have a brain tumour removed. I had to read this section more than once because I couldn't believe that Martin managed somehow to make this tragedy her own. It was as if, by comparison, her sister's suffering meant little, her parents' anguish even less. Martin had felt neglected, while Louise, in intensive care, had hogged all the limelight. Twenty years on she announces at a family dinner that she has forgiven them all "for abandoning her during this difficult time, when she was still but a child in need of love and attention".
Throughout this memoir, Martin frequently refers to her need to be liked. Yet by writing this book she has rendered herself almost impossible to like. She freely admits to being jealous of her sister and also of her toddler nephew because he takes the attention away from her. In fact, at one stage or another, she is jealous of almost everyone she knows. And there is something else: no matter how many issues are explored during her sessions, the underlying message is always the same; if only Martin had a man all would be well.
Had this memoir been well written or in any way witty, some, if not all, of this might have been overlooked. Unfortunately, the prose style brings little pleasure in the reading and the recurrence of such eyesores as "GRRRR!" and "Arrrrgggghhhh!!" is unforgivable. Then there's the subject. Not a paragraph goes by that is not fully engrossed with Lorna Martin. And that's a subject that is neither funny, nor remotely interesting.
Christine Dwyer Hickey is a short-story writer and novelist