Out of Me: The Story of a Postnatal Breakdown

by Fiona Shaw, Adam Phillips (Preface)

Fiona Shaw has a loving husband, a dream cottage in Yorkshire, and has just given birth to her second child. Ten days later she is hospitalized in a psychiatric unit for severe postnatal depression. In this powerful memoir she describes how the "Baby Blues" suddenly developed into something much more serious, and recalls the months of despair which nearly destroyed her. She eventually emerged from the nightmare and produced this startling testimony and regained control of her life and triumphed over the past.

Genres: Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 1997

About the author

Not to be confused with Fiona Shaw, the Irish-born stage & screen actress.

Fiona was born in London in 1964. Her place of birth is now a hospital broom cupboard and her first home was on a street later obliterated beneath a superstore off the Cromwell Rd. However, she passed most of her childhood as the eldest of three girls in a lovely and spacious family home near the Thames.

Fiona studied various literatures at the Universities of York and Sussex, finishing with a PhD on poet Elizabeth Bishop.

Since then, Fiona has written a memoir and four novels and done the habitual round of the novelist’s other jobs to help balance out her stubborn desire to write.

Fiona has worked as a Royal Literary Fund writing fellow at the University of York, 2007-2009, and is now working as RLF writing fellow in Sheffield University, attached to the Animal and Plant Sciences Department.

Living in York with her partner and two daughters, Fiona reads a great deal, cycles everywhere, grows vegetables with variable success and acquires more films than she ever gets around to watching. She is working on her fifth novel.

Reviews

[Ellie Breen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brutally honest, shocking and quite disturbing at parts. Shaw dissects her past: ECT, ‘baby blues,’ back pains and childhood trauma. I enjoyed this terribly. My only criticism was the mismatched structure that jumped around from one place to the next (although she holds herself accountable to this) and how she compared herself to Plath, saying she had it ‘worse’. But overall, a must read.

[Paul A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Backstory enhances understanding of the more detailed and more ……….

……..nuanced parts of her novel YADA YADA YADA YADA yadayaa YADA YADA YADA YADA yada YADA and so. Forth and