Please don’t think I’ve gone soft in the head with my next book selection. I can’t remember how a memoir by Brooke Shields even crossed my path, or what possessed me to pick it up. Given the hit and miss quality of celebrity memoirs, I suspect I wasn't particularly hopeful about this one.
It may have been the topic: post-partum depression that ultimately drew me in. I’d first heard about the condition through my undergraduate psychology degree and other references, but I'd never read an in-depth, first-hand account of the experience. So, I was curious.
Down Came the Rain begins with Shields learning her pregnancy is no longer viable after many fertility challenges and interventions, including in vitro fertilization. The pregnancy had followed a fairy-tale courtship and marriage to Chris Henchy: a comedy writer. After the miscarriage and subsequent failed fertility procedures, they were just about to take a break from trying when an in vitro attempt finally took.
Shields delighted in her pregnancy, which was uneventful. But the birth involved an unplanned C-section after more than 24 hours of unproductive labour, and then a serious post-delivery haemorrhage that took time to resolve. Their daughter Rowan Francis Henchy was born healthy overall, although had several temporary health challenges, including jaundice, and unstable hip joints.
The most significant challenges happened post-partum. Trying to recover from the trauma of childbirth, as well as deal in the background with the death of her father just three weeks earlier, Shields felt used up. Over her five days in the hospital, she described herself as being “in a bizarre state of mind…with feelings that ranged from embarrassment to stoicism to melancholy to shock.” She lacked joy and a connection with her daughter, which she initially put down to just being tired and needing to recover physically.
But Shields' fatigue, emotional distress, and disconnection from Rowan only increased, and seemed more severe than the so-called baby blues. Her lack of understanding about what was going on only served to fuel her negative thinking, lack of engagement, and hopelessness. Eventually she was given medication that seemed to help, but that improvement then prompted her to discontinue medication cold turkey. This led to a quick decline, where she experienced overwhelming suicidal thoughts while driving with her daughter.
The rest of the book recounts her gradual improvement after this crisis, with the help of medication, therapy, and other supports. She grappled with some of the usual challenges of motherhood: lack of sleep, division of labour in the home, family dynamics, and later integrating work back into the mix. And, she also had to learn to distinguish between the normal worries of a new parent, and her reactions that might signal the need for more therapeutic work.
So, what is it about this celebrity memoir that makes it a keeper for me?
As I reflect on the many memoirs I've read (celebrity or otherwise), I'm generally drawn in by one or more of these factors: my interest in the author's life, the art of the writing, the skill of the storytelling, and/or the topic or themes of the memoir. See my post on Drinking: A Love Story for a memoir that hits all these elements.
In re-reading Down Came the Rain recently, I was not as pleasantly surprised by the writing as I had been originally. It wasn’t bad, but it could have benefited from further editing. And that’s not where its strength really lies. When this book was published in 2005, there were very few personal stories of post-partum depression, and none I can remember by a celebrity. Even more taboo, the book described a mother severely compromised by mental illness: a mother who was not extolling the joys of motherhood—in fact, quite the opposite.
The author's stream-of-consciousness narrative, as she's mired deep in her depression, is difficult to read at times. The self-loathing and struggle to reconcile a despondent state of mind with the objective reality of her seemingly fortunate circumstances (a loving spouse, a longed-for healthy child, financial resources and security, a rich network of supportive family and friends) is raw and a stretch to grasp for those who haven't stood in her shoes. She dares greatly in this regard, and readers who stick with her get a gritty glimpse into the disordered, distorted thinking that makes severe post-partum depression—and clinical depression more generally—so debilitating and often misunderstood.
Like many celebrity memoirs, this one offers some manner of resolution and a dose of hope in the end. But, unlike some others, it does not come across as self-promotion or an image restoration strategy; in fact, at the time, it risked just the opposite. And Tom Cruise did not disappoint. His Scientologist-tainted public rants on the evils of psychiatric drugs in response to Shields' memoir seemed everywhere for a while, In the end though, it was Tom who needed the image restoration.
Although this memoir will not be everyone’s cup of tea for various reasons, and celebrity memoirs in general can engender some eye-rolling, I encourage you to explore the genre. As mentioned before, some memoirs are engrossing simply by virtue of the author’s life (for example, the late David Crosby’s Long Time Gone is a wild ride!). Others use the platform and their high-visibility influence to shine a light on a stigmatized, in-the shadows topic that lacks a voice. Putting forward that voice can be a gamble, and that’s why Down Came the Rain made my bookshelf.
