I'm Fine (and other lies)

"""Motherhood is hard. Read this book. It will help. And if you still need more help, please please ask. It's out there"" - Caroline Overington, journalist and author ""An intensely personal and heartfelt story of one woman's journey through depression to find herself - she like so many women, was so critical of herself as she transitioned into motherhood, and struggled to ask for help and be heard. I hope this helps other women free themselves of their own negative internal voice long enough to get help."" - Anne Buist, psychiatrist and author ""I could kiss this book. This brilliant and incredibly candid book woke me up, making me reappraise all the mothers in my life and wonder how many struggle to cope and how they could have been helped. This is not a dry book offering self-help and useless facts, but a memoir of a harrowing experience described with honesty and humour. And so she delivers a spectacularly frank book that lets sunlight into all the dark places. As she describes her depression she tells it as a dialogue, her depressed doubting self heckling down every moment of positive help or chance. Therein lies some of the best writing on depression that I've ever encountered. In this book there is no fat narrative padding, no indulgent pain-porn or wallowing in the suffering. I'm Fine (and other lies) leaves you with this thought: the secret to coping is to not hide. As a testament to the strength and fragility of mothers (and the burdens they carry in plain sight that we choose not to see), perhaps I'm Fine is the Mother's Day read we all owe ourselves. Beautifully written, moving and powerful, it is a challenge to the stigma of not just postnatal depression, but all mental illness."" - Robert O'Hearn, non-fiction specialist, Booktopia"