Pages 68–78

Y.D.A.U. — Kate Gompert · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

A hospital psych ward, fifth floor, metro Boston, under the same Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment header. Katherine — Kate — Gompert, 21, a first appearance, lies on Suicide-Watch three days after a nearly fatal overdose; the young doctor interviewing her (unnamed, a resident on a twelve-week psych rotation) is new too. The narration runs through his head in chart-language — clinical, notating, deliberate — and her voice keeps breaking through it. Plain heads-up: ten pages of a suicide attempt and of depression described from the inside.

Terms, in order of appearance

Yevtuschenko; Dretske (pp. 68, 70) — the clinical authorities the doctor thinks in; the names are all the scene gives.
unipolar (p. 69) — clinical shorthand: depression alone, no manic swings.
Parnate, Lithonate, Zoloft (p. 69) — real meds: an MAOI antidepressant, lithium, sertraline. Endnote 28 (keyed p. 70) covers why the mix nearly killed her.
ECT (pp. 69, 75) — electroconvulsive therapy, the "shock" she asks for by name; endnote 29 rides the p. 75 mention.
circumorals / thigmotactic (p. 75) — mouth-ring muscles; touch-triggered. The doctor's diction for her smile "empty of all affect."
Bob Hope (p. 75) — the marijuana argot of endnote 27 (p. 67), now also dealers' phone code; Kate glosses it herself: "Dope. Sinse. Stick. Grass."
duBois (p. 75) — a joint; the "duBois-gesture" is thumb and finger held to rounded lips.
Collyrium (p. 76) — real brand of eyewash; endnote 30 lingers on its apothecary-blue eye-cup.
TP (p. 76) — teleputer, the era's TV-computer and cartridge player; the abbreviation's been current since Erdedy's wait (pp. 17–27).
Nichols and the big Indian (p. 78) — One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and its shock scene; "Nichols" is Jack Nicholson, misremembered.

After you read: three things

1. She corrects the clinical frame twice — let her definitions set the scene. First: "I wasn't trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself. There's a difference." (p. 71). Then, against the word depression: "this isn't a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over." (p. 73). What follows is her doing the defining the chart can't — a horror that's "about to happen and also it's happening, all at the same time," a nausea in every cell.

2. The scene hands you its own reading instruction on p. 71: here "sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them." The doctor's method forbids him to laugh — hence the deadpan standoffs around "I am sitting up" and "then I remembered where I am." You're free to hear the joke and the scream at once; he has to choose.

3. Her gamble — "Not 'drugs.'" Then: "Stopping." The secret life she confesses (pp. 76–77) — one-hitters out the window-fan, the Do-They-Know paranoia, fifty one-hitters in dumpsters, the feeling arriving a couple of weeks after each quit — is the same shape as Erdedy's wait (pp. 17–27), told aloud to a stranger. Her dealer "with snakes in a tank in a trailer in Allston" sounds a lot like the snake-keeping trailer dealer of pp. 39–40. And p. 78 states the doctor's literature flatly has no place for any of it.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.