Adventures Manic Depression: Tales Fine Madness

"Adventures In Manic Depression," is not a book about manic-depression, "although I make no bones that I have been living with this condition since I was nine years old" says author Stuart Goldman. The book is a collection of Goldman's work-both fiction and non-fiction, culled from over 40 years of writing for newspapers and magazines. "The hardest thing about putting this book together," Goldman says, was to find an "order" to put the stories into. A lifetime professional musician, Goldman said that putting "Adventures" together was rather like composing a symphony. "It was all about rhythm, timing, when to use a crescendo, and when to let the music (stories) become so soft that you have to strain to hear them. Ultimately, I was trying to create a mood, more than anything else." Goldman's first draft of "Adventures" was over 750 pages long, and cutting it down to its current 430-page length was "incredibly difficult." He spent the last three months of the year it took him to put the book together, taking it apart and putting it back together, as one would a jigsaw puzzle. "When you have a book that includes straight investigative reportage (Goldman covered both the Menendez Brothers Murder case and the Natalee Holloway Murder Case, for the book) "it's not easy to fit other types of material into that mood set." Coupled with darkly humorous stories, and memoirs-including pieces about the death of both his mother and his father-Goldman says that in writing "Adventures," he's entered virtually every area of the human psyche. As for manic-depression itself, though Goldman states that the book doesn't deal with this subject directly, that "there's no doubt that some of my characters suffer from this malady." "This is definitely not a fun read, says Goldman. "It's a book that's going to take the reader into some very dark places, though it's certainly not without it's moments of joy sadness, and dark humor." Goldman has dedicated the book to his father, Maurice Goldman-a well-known composer of classical (primarily Yiddish) music, and his mother, Ethel Mann Goldman, who, at age 18 was the youngest flautist in the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra. Goldman, who gave up playing music professionally (he traveled on the road with a number of country and blues artists, including Doug Kershaw ("The Rajun' Cajun"), John Stewart-former member of the Kingston Trio-and Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, says that when he decided to quit the music scene, he took up writing, "because it was the only other thing I knew how to do. "And if, for some reason, I found that I couldn't' write anymore, I'd wind up playing music again-I'm quite sure of that."