Things That Helped: essays

Through the tide of hormones ebbing and flowing my body, and the little runnels of blood and the sour tang of my breasts, I lay awake, listening, and thinking of breath and of water. I had broken my relationship with sleep.

In this stunning collection, Jessica Friedmann navigates her journey through postpartum depression after the birth of her son, Owen. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and personal experience, her wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness.

Occasionally confronting, but always powerfully moving and beautifully observed, Things That Helped charts Jessica's return into the world—a slow and complex process of reassembling what depression fractured and sometimes broke.

Things That Helped is a beautiful book—heartfelt, fiercely intelligent, and urgent. It is a powerful affirmation of friendship, family, art, and love, and how these things might shape a life, and give it strength. It does not shy away from the complex, often painful, and sometimes bloody experiences of womanhood and motherhood. It is fascinating, luscious, and engrossing, and, despite its difficult subject matter, an absolute joy to read."

- Fiona Wright, author of Small Acts of Disappearance

"An impressive debut. Friedmann views the world through a lens of intersectionality, and she has a sharp eye for how gender, race, and class shape the family unit. Her language is deeply visceral, and therefore hugely affecting, when describing the feeling of pregnancy, motherhood, and mental illness. Things That Helped makes readers feel and think."

- Books&Publishing