Yesterday, I finished reading Alice W. Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. Generally, I do not write reviews because even my compliments can be pretty critical and I’m little inclined to give five-star reviews in this era when a four-star review is often taken as a grave insult. Also, a good review takes some effort, so I generally don’t review even books that I like a lot.
Disclaimer
To the best of my knowledge, I have no connection with the author, Flaherty, or the publisher, Houghton Mifflin. I am not being paid to write this review.
Flaherty’s Midnight Disease (2004, Houghton Mifflin)
Writer’s block interests me, so I bought this book. I suppose that the biggest disappointment in this book is that it’s more about writing a lot (hypergraphia) than writer’s block. This is not a self-help book to help you with your own writer’s block.
That being said, I wouldn’t be reviewing this book if I didn’t think it would be of interest to many. For this book to work well for you, you do really have to have some interest in neurophysiology. If you don’t want to hear about the different functions of different parts of the brain, then this book is not for you.
One of my favorite books in a while
As a writing coach, I am a firm believer in understanding the crucial role of our bodies, including our physiology and neurophysiology, in writing well. With my view of human cognition/intelligence as deriving both from our bodies (cf., e.g., by Lakoff and Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh, or Varela et al. in The Embodied Mind) and our environments (cf. Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild), this insight into the neurophysiology of writing, language, and more general neurological function helps me understand the writing process better.
The discussion of neurological conditions was fascinating with respect to understanding the vast diversity of human experience. Many of the stories felt so alien to my own experience as to almost be unbelievable (e.g., synesthesia–in which the hearer of a sound also sees color or shape).
If you’re generally interested in the process of writing, if you have any interest in a discussion of neurophysiology that is comprehensible to the average well-educated reader, then this is an excellent book. Five stars.
One of my favorite passages in a long time
There were times where I felt the author entertained some overly self-indulgent digressions. One of them, however, offered the best comic delivery and payoff that I have ever seen in a serious non-fiction book about writing. The author did something right when the sentence “Most of these people did not seek medical help quickly,” has you chuckling repeatedly for several days after you read it, and draws laughter from everyone with whom you share the excerpt. I’m tempted to give it five stars just on the basis of that one passage.