![]() I had seen Medea at BAM before working here, and Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner’s production reminded me so brutally of my mother, I couldn’t even weep. I’ve worked at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the last seven years programming what we call here “humanities”, meaning events that provide context around our season, literary events and more unusual things. ![]() ![]() In Euripides’s tragedy Medea, maddened by grief, the eponymous character murders her children in revenge for her husband’s adultery. Unwillingly, very much involuntarily, she had nearly killed me and my sister more than once. She almost killed herself many times before her final attempt: which wasn’t an attempt or a call for help, it was irrevocable and deliberate. She suffered from severe postpartum depression bordering on psychosis after my birth and, before me, my sister’s. She struggled since adolescence with what she called manic depression, and what I remembered the medical establishment describing – as I asked around, desperate to understand– as close to schizophrenia. ![]() My mother took her own life in July 2009. ![]()
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