By Maer Roshan

A decade ago, during a period when I Was depressingly unemployed, my friend, the author Andrew Solomon, invited me to join him at the biannual convention of the Hemlock Society, a group advocating the legalization of assisted suicide, which took place at a Marriott in Kansas City. The New Yorker--for whom Andrew was writing a piece on the right-to-death movement--paid my way as his assistant, though assisting Andrew largely turned out to mean fetching us drinks at the hotel bar. At the convention's final evening, Solomon convinced several of Hemlock's members to accompany him to a gay disco. They ended up dancing with a posse of drag queens to Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," while Solomon diligently took notes under the disco ball. Survival, and perseverance over what Tennessee Williams described as "life's petty indignities" have long informed the work of Andrew Solomon, a charmingly eccentric Yale- and Cambridge-educated author who has plumbed his own life and psyche to produce acutely personal, highly pr aised work of both fiction and nonfiction. In articles for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, he has addressed the thorny moral and ethical questions surrounding depression, AIDS, illness and survivor guilt. In A Stone Boat (Plume), his highly acclaimed first novel, he touched on his own family's experience with assisted suicide. Now, in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Solomon chronicles his own six-year struggle with depression, unflinchingly recounting the sometimes gruesome realities of his illness while examining the malady in meticulously researched cultural, medical and scientific terms. The book, published by Scribner this month, has already elicited rave reviews from an assortment of cultural and critical heavyweights, including Larry McMurtry and William Styron. But the most important critique came from his father, who witnessed his son's devastating illness and slow recovery firsthand. "He said I told it like it really was," says Solomon.

MAER ROSHAN: Reading your book I was struck by how intensely personal it was. Did you ever second-guess yourself?

ANDREW SOLOMON: Oh yes. I kept thinking, I just can't do this. But, at the same time, I wanted to give a voice to what I'd been through. One of the things that freaked me out as I started thinking about depression is that, by and large, people smooth over a lot of their experiences. You get people saying, "I couldn't even gain pleasure from the beautiful flowers that bloom in my garden." The reality of depression is the flowers in the garden are just not even in the picture. "I was physically paralyzed, I was afraid of my shower and I was throwing up," is much more what it's like when you're really down at the bottom.

MR: What caused your depression?

AS: I think most people have the capacity to become depressed, and that some people are more vulnerable to depression, and so very slight things will trigger it. I would say I fall somewhere in the middle. In many ways, I've had a very nice and easy life, but I'd had a number of life difficulties that I don't think were so awful, but that were rough. The immediate trigger was my mother's illness and death, but I think to a greater extent the fact that my novel dealt very explicitly with my sexuality was actually quite difficult for me. I had a lot of issues around masculinity and sexuality, and I also worried about what my parents ideals were for me, and how I fell short of those ideals. I had my first breakdown shortly after I'd turned 30. Somehow the chaos that had been concomitant with what friends were experiencing while I was in my twenties was really intolerable once I got into my thirties. I was very confused about who I was at a period when some people are acquiring a more stable identity. It gave me a feeling of panic and fear and emptiness.

MR: Is the experience of depression different for younger people than for older people?

AS: Young people who experience depression are much more likely to move rapidly towards suicide. They don't have the sense that older people tend to have, that you can endure difficulties and come out on the other side of them. Older people who suffer depression are frequently under the misapprehension that it is a natural part of growing old. Midlife is probably the best time to have depression, because you have a sense that you've got quite a lot of life in front of you and that if you can get through this, there might be some things to live for.

MR: Are you more likely to recover from depression if you're young?

AS: The younger you are, the more intractable it's likely to be. Early depression is a heavy burden to be carrying on into your adult life, but if you can get good treatment, you can control it starting quite early on. And it's certainly the case that if you get treatment early on in your first depressive episode, it will be much easier to turn things around.

MR: In the book you also discuss the biological and physiological reasons for depression.

AS: I think the distinction between the biological and the experiential is ultimately a false one. Experiences trigger one's vulnerability, and then once it's triggered, the biological and the experiential go hand-in-hand.

MR: Did you find that people believe depression is an illness?

AS: There's definitely been significant progress but a lot of people still do not quite believe it is. One of the things I've discovered is that many depressed people get involved in self-destructive patterns--activities that are somehow going to cause illness to be manifested in them--because of this. I actually went out and had a lot of unsafe sex. In a way, it's much easier if you have a disease that can be detected in your bloodstream or seen when people look at you. The invisibility of depression to the naked eye makes it much harder for people to tolerate. I felt that if I got AIDS, that everyone would understand why it was that I couldn't go on living--it would give me an excuse or a way out.

MR: How does that make you feel today?

AS: It makes me feel sick and sad when I remember that time. And I'm terrified that one day I'll feel that way again. But I recognize it as part of who I am.

MR: And how are you doing now?

AS: Once you've gone through multiple depressive episodes, your brain has a biology that takes off on its own.

And every time you have an episode, your depression gets harder to treat. So I've just accepted that unless there's a huge scientific breakthrough at some point, I will take medication every day for the rest of my life.

MR: You've complained about how irritated you get with people who ask you when you're going to stop taking your medication.

AS: I'm like somebody who's had congestive heart failure and has been put on a blood pressure--lowering medication, and people say, "When are you going to learn to go off it?" And you say, "I'm not going to go off it. If I go off it, I'll have a heart attack." But if you say, "I'm not going to go off this medication because if I do I'll have another breakdown and that would be really, really bad," people still say, "But you seem OK now." It's just maddening.

MR: When you talk about breakdowns, you're not talking about just staying in bed for a day and being depressed. Your breakdowns were pretty bad.

AS: Yeah, my breakdowns were really, really, really bad. I reached a point where I was physically unable to do the ordinary things of everyday life. I'd been feeling bad, I'd been not having any fun, I'd been feeling panicked about my future, I'd been feeling somewhat suicidal. I had all kinds of things going on, and then one day I couldn't get out of bed. I was physically paralyzed in my bed. I thought I'd had a stroke. And when I tried to do anything, I was overcome by such overpowering, incredible fear. I've gone skydiving several times, and it was much easier to jump out of a plane at a high altitude than it was for me at that point to get out of bed and make my way to the bathroom to get a glass of water. It really is a breakdown; you just don't function anymore.

MR: Can you describe the fear in retrospect?

AS: It's like a very extended version of the feeling you have after you've tripped and before you hit the ground. Every instance of the day was intolerable and painful. I didn't know how I was going to get through the next 30 seconds. Somebody else said, and I quoted her in the book, that it was like the minute your fingers are slammed in the car door. With depression, this painful sensation is extended. You think, "I can't go on this way." It's the way I imagined it must have been to be burned at the stake.

MR: When you're faced with that, what do you think about?

AS: What you think about immediately is killing yourself. It's not that you think life is ultimately meaningless, it's that you think, "I can't go through another five minutes of this, I have to put an end to this pain."

MR: Why do you think you never did that?

AS: I was always acutely aware of the pain that I would cause my family and the people that loved me if I killed myself. I didn't want to hurt other people. Then, as I began to get better, I also believed, "OK, eventually I'll be on the other side of this and maybe life will be worth it."

MR: When you look back on the past years, what was the worst point for you?

AS: The absolute bottom was when I first experienced depression, because I didn't understand what was happening to me. The most embarrassing moment was when I went out to dinner with a group of people and became so panicked I couldn't understand what anyone was saying to me. I just felt this rising tide of hysteria and it was terribly humiliating. There are a bunch of bad times that come back to me. There was the time when I was at a bookstore where I was supposed to be doing a reading for my book, and I just went into the bathroom and locked the door and lay on the ground thinking, "I've got to get up, I've got to do this reading."

MR: Is there anything positive that has come out of this experience?

AS: I think I'm nicer and more sympathetic and less snobbish than I was; I certainly know myself better than I ever did. Ultimately, I think that will lead to more whole, more profound and more meaningful relationships. It's made my attachments stronger, also.

MR: You've written about euthanasia, assisted suicide and depression--what's your next book about? Something lighter, I hope.

AS: I'm currently working on a novel about abandonment. [laughs] But after that, I want to write a comedy of manners. [laughs]

Maer Roshan interviewed Frank Rich for the December 2000 issue of Interview.