Growing up in a hyper-educated, artistic, eccentric family, Ted Scheinman, the son of a medical doctor and an English professor, spent much of his precocious childhood as a writer and performer—and his greatest performance was as someone who was happy. He recognized his depression early and recorded its effects in a series of tragicomic journals, always hoping that the ritual of doing so would palliate if not cure.
While the clouds occasionally parted, particularly during Ted’s years of intellectual questing at Hotchkiss and Yale—and, fleetingly, through his emergence as a successful journalist—his gloom kept returning, seemingly more debilitating each time. Eventually, a series of emotional plunges deposited Ted, at age thirty-five, in a psych ward in Washington, DC. There, he began an intensive course of electroconvulsive therapy—considered by most a treatment of last resort. The controversial procedure saved his life, but it also exacted a price: he was now missing important pieces of his memory.
By turns deeply gripping, startlingly perceptive, understatedly hilarious, and heartbreakingly poignant, particularly in Ted’s depiction of his romantic relationships, Jolt asks: How do our families shape who we are, for good and ill? How much of our character is ingrained versus sculpted by circumstances? How can we adapt when our memory fails? Perhaps most critically: What are we willing to sacrifice to have a chance at life?
Ultimately, this exceptionally engrossing memoir brings hope to anyone who has ever tried desperately to regain their footing and rejoin the world.
Ted Scheinman is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine and contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. His 2018 debut, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, garnered enthusiastic praise on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. His essays and reporting have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, GQ, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Slate. He and his wife make their home in Washington, DC.
Jennie Rothenberg Gritz is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine and a former senior editor at The Atlantic. Her forthcoming book, The Inward Trip: The Untold Story of Meditation in the West, offers readers an invaluable guide through the history and science of the various forms of meditation practiced in the U.S. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her two teenage children.
