To Depression, with Love
A Memoir
The vulnerable memoir To Depression, with Love is a deep portrait of a life shaped by depression and anxiety.
Reflecting on a lifetime shaped by mental illness, Marsha Jacobson’s memoir To Depression, with Love is compassionate in reimagining what it means to live a full life with depression and anxiety.
Jacobson’s childhood was shaped by silence, secrets, and high expectations. Her first encounter with depression came when she was a teenager in South Africa. She had recurring episodes of depression and anxiety across different stages of her life, including during university, marriage, motherhood, and immigration. In adulthood, she began to seek therapy, reflect on family patterns, and raise four children who also faced mental health challenges.
Exploring the impact of mental illness on Jacobson’s relationships, identity, and sense of self, the book includes compelling revelations, as with an early description of being unable to eat during a depressive episode at university. Details like eating the same egg-salad sandwich every day capture the rhythms of living with depression better than clinical descriptions or abstract reflections ever could. Later, the book introduces the idea of a “worry waiting room,” a mental space for anxious thoughts to sit and wait to be dealt with. This practice of naming fear and setting it aside reflects the book’s larger patterns of unpacking mental illness with patience and intention.
These practices also exist in contrast to Jacobson’s family’s habit of keeping secrets, which she likens to sweeping skeletons under rugs. Her father’s emotional silence, enforced by generational trauma and cultural expectations, and her mother’s deep need to maintain appearances shaped Jacobson’s early sense that difficult emotions should be hidden. These family dynamics are explored with steady awareness of how they shaped Jacobson’s instinct to suppress pain and mask distress with humor or perfectionism.
The book unfolds in a nonlinear manner, shaped more by memory than by strict chronology. Some chapters pause to explore family history or return to earlier events from new angles. For instance, Jacobson revisits her early depressive episodes more than once, each time with new context from later life, adding weight to her reflections. This structure makes space to build meaning over time, with each layer adding depth to the portrait of a life shaped by depression and anxiety. Instead of moving toward a single resolution, the memoir layers experiences and insights together in a way that matches the complexity of its subject.
A thoughtful memoir, To Depression, with Love reflects on the long, unfinished work of living with depression across time, family, and change.
Reviewed by
Kiana Curtis
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
