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you’re so depressed,
like it’s the most obvious response. They react as if my family situation was particularly alarming and troublesome, as opposed to what it actually is in this day and age: perfectly normal. I mean, I think about my development and I feel like a Census Bureau statistic or some sort of case study on the changing nature of the American family in the late twentieth century. My parents are divorced, I grew up in a female-headed household, my mother was always unemployed or marginally employed, my father was always uninvolved or marginally involved in my life. There was never enough money for anything, my mom had to sue my dad for unpaid child support and unpaid medical bills, my dad eventually disappeared. But all this information is no more outstanding than the plot of an Ann Beattie novel. Or maybe it’s not even that interesting.
    In college, I can remember sitting around dorm rooms and coffeehouses late at night during my freshman year comparing family horror stories with my new friends. We’d almost be competitive about whose father was the least responsible (Jordana would always complain that her dad had enough money for fine wines and a Park Avenue apartment, but he still never so much as took her to dinner), or whose mother was the most scattered, hysterical, or just plain out of it from being overburdened with parenting duties (I always won that contest). It was always interesting to see who could hold the record for not communicating with the noncustodial parent (almost always the father) the longest, either because he’d gotten remarried and moved to San Diego or because he was just a cut-rate shithead who’d skipped town for no particular reason.
    The more children of divorce I have met over the years, the more common and trivial my own family history starts to seem. And I always feel so stupid sitting in therapy talking about my problems because, Jesus Christ, so what? I can’t equate the amount of pain and misery and despair I have suffered and endured as a depressive with the events of my life, which just seem so common. My reaction has been uncommonly strong, but really, it seems wrong to blame a statistical fact of life for any of it.
    When you consider the widespread nature of depression—particularly among people my age—it all becomes completely numbing, like so much pounding on a frozen, paralyzed limb that bruises but no longer feels. The particulars of what has driven this or that person to Zoloft, Paxil, or Prozac, or the reasons that some other person believes herself to be suffering from a major depression, seem less significant than the simple fact of it. To ask anyone how he happened to fall into a state of despair always involves new variations on the same myriad mix of family history. There is always divorce, death, drunkenness, drug abuse and whatnot in any of several permutations. I mean, is there anybody out there who
doesn’t
think her family is dysfunctional?
    Â 
    But surely my dad couldn’t have
always
slept through our visits. After all, he was an avid photographer, he loved his Nikon, and I was his favorite subject. The only sure way to keep him awake was to hand him a camera. His preschool pictures of me are the best: as a two-year-old chasing a squirrel in Central Park; drinking from a water fountain in the zoo; sitting on the desk at my mother’s office, my dress inadvertently hiked up so much that my underwear shows; wearing my mom’s shoes and sunglasses around the house; walking the dog. There is even one particular shot of me sitting cross-legged on a park bench in stretchy shorts and a white T-shirt with pigtails and thick bangs and Indian beads around my neck, and a cryptic, pensive expression on my face. One of my cheeks is puffed out, like I’m bored or confused. People thought that picture was so cute that it ended up on a greeting card with typed haiku-ish words on it saying, “People like me like