When the book was published in hardcover last year, author Tracy Thompson didn't head out on any massive book tours.
She did some appearances close to her Virginia-area home and was interviewed on NPR. But the real response came over the Internet. Namely in the form of e-mail from other mothers who wrote, "It made all the difference to know I am not crazy and I'm not a bad mother and this is a real problem," Thompson said in a telephone interview last week.
"People don't want to talk about it unless they are dealing with it, then they are desperate to talk about it." Depression and parenting is still an issue most people consider "hush-hush," said Thompson, a former Washington Post reporter who battled depression for almost two decades before becoming suicidal at age 34.
She recovered, and wrote about the experience in "The Beast: A Journey Through Depression," published in 1995.
But starting a new chapter of her life - motherhood - brought new joys and overwhelming emotional challenges. While pregnant with her first daughter, Rebecca, Thompson's depression returned in full force, and wouldn't lift.
After giving birth she would often collapse in tears, exhausted by the demands of caring for a needy infant. Sometimes she was seized by fits of fury. Once, angry over a computer glitch and alone in the house, she nearly destroyed her own kitchen cabinets in a rage.
Depressed mothers are a gigantic sorority of suffering - 12 of the 19 million Americans affected by depression every year are women, the preponderance in the prime childbearing years of 25 to 44, Thompson writes.
"I'm not talking about a bad day, or even one of those bad patches every family goes through from time to time," she writes in "The Ghost in the House," now out in paperback. "Maternal depression is a Bad Day that comes for a visit and refuses to leave."
In her compelling mixture of memoir and research, Thompson deciphers an insidious form of women's mental illness directly related to trying to satisfy the needs of children, fueled by the perfectionist, nearly unattainable standards American society has set for modern mothers.
