Read Marian Keyes - Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married for Free Online

part of being alive, part of the deal, sunny days and earaches.

    People got depressed about money (about not having enough of it, I mean). Unpleasant things happened to people--relationships fell apart, jobs were lost, televisions broke down two days after the guarantee ran out and so on and so on--and people felt miserable about them.

    I knew all that, but the depression that I suffered from wasn't just an oc- casional bout of the blues or a dose of Holly Golightly's mean reds--al- though I got them also, and fairly regularly at that. So did a lot of people, especially if they had just had a week of heavy drinking and very little sleep, but the blues and the mean reds were mere child's play compared to the savage black killer demons that descended on me from time to time to play crucifixion with my head.

    Mine was no ordinary depression, oh no, mine was the super, deluxe, top-of-the-range, no-expense-spared version.

    Not that any of it was immediately obvious on first meeting me. I wasn't miserable all of the time, in fact a lot of the time I was bright and personable and entertaining. And even when I felt dreadful I tried very hard to 32 / marian keyes

    act as though I didn't. It was only when things got so desperate that I couldn't conceal it any longer that I took to my bed and waited for it to pass. Which it invariably did, sooner or later.

    The worst bout of depression that I ever had was actually my first one.

    I was seventeen and it was the summer that I had left school, and for no reason--apart from all the obvious ones--I got the idea into my head that the world was a very sad, lonely, unfair, cruel, heart-breaking kind of a place.

    I got depressed about things that were happening to people in far-flung corners of the world, people that I didn't even know and wasn't ever likely to know, especially considering that the main reason that I felt depressed about them was that they were dying of hunger or of a plague or from their house falling in on top of them during an earthquake.

    I cried at every piece of news that I heard or saw--car crashes, famines, wars, programs about AIDS victims, stories of mothers dying and leaving young children, reports on battered wives, interviews with men who had been laid off in their thousands from coalmines and knew that even though they were only forty they would never work again, newspaper articles about families of six who had to feed themselves on fifty pounds a week, pictures of neglected donkeys.

    I found a child's blue-and-white mitten on the pavement near my house one day and the grief that it triggered was almost unbearable. The thought of a tiny chilled hand, or of the other mitten, all alone without its mate was so poignant that I cried wet, hot, choking tears every time I saw it. lucy sullivan is getting married / 33

    After a while I wouldn't leave the house. And shortly after that I wouldn't get out of bed.

    It was horrendous. I felt as though I was personally in touch with every ounce of grief in the world, that I had an Internet of sorrow in my head, that every atom of sadness that had ever existed was being channeled through me, before being packaged up and transported to outlying areas, like I was a kind of centralized misery depot.

    My mother took charge. With the efficiency of a despot being threatened with a coup d'�tat, she imposed a total news blackout. I was banned from watching television.

    And every evening when my brothers came home, my mother frisked them at the front door to relieve them of any copies of newspapers that they may have had secreted about their persons, before they could gain admittance to the house.

    Not that her media clampdown made any difference. I had the admirable skill of being able to locate a tragedy--however small--in absolutely any- thing. I managed to cry at the description of little bulbs dying in a February frost in the gardening magazine that was my only permitted reading mate- rial.

    Eventually Dr. Thornton was