Book Description
From acclaimed designer and novelist Peter Mendelsund, a deeply personal reflection on depression and the redemptive power of art, interspersed with 100 original paintings
In the early days of the pandemic, Peter Mendelsund and his family traveled up to a secluded New Hampshire farmhouse to weather the chaos. There began his journey through a crippling and seemingly intractable depression—which differed in degree but not in kind from episodes that have recurred periodically throughout his life—that brought him to the brink of suicide.
Relief came from an unlikely source: painting, something Peter had never contemplated doing before. And yet it became the thing that may very well have saved his life. Bleakly funny, profoundly moving, and—against all odds—truly inspiring, Exhibitionist is not just an account of a mind thinking through its own suffering in real-time, and of the author’s reckoning with his father’s tortured legacy; it’s also the story of the birth of an artist, and a portrait of an artist at work.
Praise For This Book
"With Exhibitionist, Peter Mendelsund paints a vivid and unique portrait of isolation, sometimes with words, sometimes with acrylics, always with warmth." —Sloane Crosley, author of Grief Is for People"We seldom know what is really going on with people behind the scenes, or the hidden burdens they carry. Mendelsund lifts the curtain in this beautiful, painfully touching chronicle of depression and painting his way through." —Richard McGuire, author of Here
"Exhibitionist is an immersive memoir of depression and art. It is utterly mesmerizing—a work that is at once devastating and hopeful, harrowing and beautiful, revealing and mysterious, yet always searing." —David Epstein, No. 1 bestselling author of Range
