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Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness
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About This Book
Inferno is the riveting memoir of a young mother who is separated from her newborn son and husband when she's involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward in New Jersey after a harrowing bout of postpartum psychosis. When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip's end, she develops psychosis. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity. In this memoir Catherine reconstructs her sense of self, starting with her childhood as the daughter of Korean immigrants, moving through a traumatic past relationship, and on to the early years of her courtship with and marriage to her husband, James. She interweaves these parts of her past with an immediate recounting of the days she spent in the ward.
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Reviews
"Given that becoming a mother is haloed with sentimentality for too many people, Cho is courageous in sharing her harrowing descent into postpartum psychosis."
"One of the many fascinating things about this beautifully written book is that it asks us to consider what counts as normal behaviour and what doesn't ..."
"Cho's language is poetically associative and points are made through suggestive juxtaposition."
"Cho conveys how an atmosphere of constant anxiety and judgment slowly loosens her grip on what is real and what is imagined ..."
"She moves between memories – shifting and incomplete – of her twelve days in a New Jersey psychiatric ward and those of her life ..."
"In Cho's hands, the story of her psychosis is also one of her growing up and knitting together her sense of self, even as that self is coming ferociously undone ..."
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