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The multimillion-copy bestselling modern classic of autobiographical fiction about a young woman's struggle with mental illness, featuring a new foreword by Esmé Weijun Wang, the New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias
A Penguin Classic
Hailed by The New York Times as "convincing and emotionally gripping" upon its original publication in 1964, Joanne Greenberg's semiautobiographical novel, originally published under the pen name Hannah Green, stands as a timeless and unforgettable portrait of mental illness. Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, sixteen-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital, where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles toward the possibility of the "normal" life she and her family hope for, the reader is inexorably drawn into her private suffering and deep determination to confront her demons.
A modern classic, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains every bit as poignant, gripping, and relevant today as when it was first published.
Story Locale: Chicago, IL
About the author
Joanne Greenberg; Foreword by Esmé Weijun Wang; Afterword by Joanne Greenberg
Summary
The multimillion-copy bestselling modern classic of autobiographical fiction about a young woman’s struggle with mental health, featuring a new foreword by Esmé Weijun Wang, the New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias, and a new afterword by the author
Also available from Penguin Classics: Joanne Greenberg’s bestselling modern classic In This Sign
After making an attempt on her own life, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a psychiatric hospital many hours from her home in suburban Chicago. Here she will spend the next three years, trying, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, to find a path back to her “normal” life, and to emerge from the imaginary Kingdom of Yr in which she has sought refuge.
A semiautobiographical novel originally published under the pen name Hannah Green just a year after Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar--a very different portrait of psychological breakdown--I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains, more than half a century later, a timeless and ultimately hopeful book, ripe for rediscovery by a new generation eager to erase the stigma of mental illness.
For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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“I adore this book. . . . I continue to marvel at how Greenberg makes visceral the agony of psychosis. . . . [She] is not afraid to challenge the reader with a true view of the so-called sane world, to hold a crazy candle to reality, and to say, What can we see now? Is the darkness only inside, or is it outside, too?” ―Esmé Weijun Wang, from the Foreword
“Convincing and emotionally gripping.” ―The New York Times
“Marvelous . . . With a courage that is sometimes breathtaking . . . [Greenberg] makes a faultless series of discriminations between the justifications for living in an evil and complex reality and the justifications for retreating into the security of madness.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“A rare and wonderful insight into the dark kingdom of the mind.” ―Chicago Tribune
“[Joanne Greenberg] is a living example of someone who refused the fate prescribed to her and chose instead to be many other things: clever, attentive, kind, iconoclastic, and the author of more than fifteen books on wildly varying topics. Her life as a recovered patient is not a glamorous or a tragic or a particularly scary one--but it might be a truer one.” ―The New Republic
