Review of RABBITS FOR FOOD by Binnie Kirshenbaum (New Release)

4 Stars

Forty-three year old Bunny has suffered from depression virtually her entire life.  During a New Year’s Eve dinner with friends, she has a serious psychotic episode and is hospitalized.  The novel focuses on her time on a psychiatric ward where she encounters others suffering with mental illness.  Bunny (and, to some extent, her husband Albie) must make decisions concerning her treatment.

The book has a third-person narrator, but there are also first-person sections where Bunny writes short pieces based on writing prompts like “a shoebox” and “a business meeting” and “a pair” and “a hat”.  Bunny often uses these creative writing prompts to describe events from her past so they help to develop her character.  It is in one of these 300-word pieces that we learn about what happened to Bunny’s best friend, an event that has had a major impact on Bunny. 

This is not an action-packed narrative; it is a sensitive portrayal of chronic depression.  Bunny has tried different therapists and various drugs and drug combinations to little effect.  She feels misunderstood because few people know what it’s like to be her and “what it’s like not to be taken seriously, having no idea how it is to feel ashamed of who you are.”

Some suggestions as to contributing causes of depression are mentioned, though it is repeated that “Despair can’t be monitored like blood pressure or measured in centimeters like a tumor”:  “It’s often genetic, this disposition of melancholy” and “It is all too apparent:  wounds never heal, but rather, in a torpid state deep inside the medial temporal lobe of the brain, grief waits for fresh release” and “a lack of attention that might well have been a contributing factor.  A contributing factor.  One.  One of many.  Because it’s never just one thing.”

Bunny describes herself as “a headache of a person who is not easy to like.” Living with a depressive would not be easy, but I found myself growing to like her.  I loved her insightful and sarcastic comments.  When an extended family member has a child and everyone carries on “as if the parents had actually done something extraordinary,” Bunny only says, “’The earthworm is impressive because it impregnates itself.’”  When people are excited that a child has begun to walk, Bunny comments “’I’d be excited if he were flying.  But walking? No.’”  When friends are “engaged in passionate discourse about balsamic vinegar,” she comments, “’Excuse me . . . but do any of you really give a shit?  I mean, you’re going on about balsamic vinegar like it matters.  Does it? . . . Does it really matter?’”  This is a perfect response to such a vapid conversation.  Even if one does not like Bunny, it is important to remember what she mentions at the end of the book:  “People who are not easy to like, they have feelings just like nice people do.”

I found myself feeling a great deal of sympathy for Bunny.  Her family does nothing to help her; her sisters want an explanation for her depression:  “Whatever the reason, they want to be assured that it was her own damn fault.”  She has experienced loss in her life.  She is in pain:  “Bunny’s pain has no place.  She hurts everywhere.  She hurts nowhere.  Everywhere and nowhere, hers is a ghostly pain, like that of a phantom limb.  Where there is nothing, there can be no relief.”  She engages in self-harm because “Only when she hits herself or pulls her hair or bends her finger back or bites the inside of her mouth can she experience the pleasure of pain found and pain released.  It is the only way to be rid of the pain that is Bunny.  She is the point of pain.”

The author has bravely written about the complex topic of mental illness.  Her protagonist may make people uncomfortable, but her pain is heart-wrenching.  This is a novel well worth reading for its insight into depression. 

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.