Typically madness memoirs are told from the POV of the person going mad. And so it was with interest that I read Michael Greenberg’s Hurry Down Sunshine, in which he describes his daughter’s mental illness. It begins: “On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad.” And right there, right off the bat, a whiff of pretension. I can’t quite pinpoint what irked me about that opening line: the glamour associated with the word mad when Greenberg himself proves that it is anything but glamorous; the zeroing in on a date for extra added urgency when madness doesn’t just strike—it settles around you, silently surveys the territory, slowly stages a coup.

But no, I don’t think that was it. Here it is: I didn’t like the characters. Greenberg struck me as cold, aloof, a bit pretentious; his wife even more so. And I don’t think he intended to come off that way, and I’m certainly not suggesting that he is that way in real life. I mean, here’s a memoir where the man is going out of his way to care (with dedication and love, I might add) for his daughter and his mentally ill brother, and he manages to come off as cold, aloof, pretentious? How does that happen? Maybe Greenberg should be awarded for the irony.

Still, an interesting, worthwhile glimpse into the life of a family slammed by illness.