jessica friedmann

Through the tide of hormones surging within my body, and the little runnels of blood, and the sour tang of my breasts, I lay awake, listening, and thinking of breath and of water. I had broken my relationship with sleep.

In this stunning collection, Jessica Friedmann navigates her journey through postpartum depression after the birth of her son. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and personal experience, her wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness.

Occasionally confronting, but always powerfully moving and beautifully observed, Things That Helped charts Jessica’s return into the world: a slow and complex process of reassembling what depression fractured, and sometimes broke.

PRAISE FOR JESSICA FRIEDMANN

‘[A]n extraordinary account of extreme postnatal depression, as seen from the eye of the storm.’ The Guardian

‘To read these essays is to observe a keen intelligence at work both coolly analysing the social forces and gender expectations that inform our understanding of this condition, while grappling with powerful feelings that bewilder and appal her.’ The Saturday Age