A fearless, candid memoir interweaving the author’s descent into depression with a medical and cultural history of the illness. At the age of twenty-seven, married, living in New York, and working in book design, Mary Cregan gives birth to her first child, a daughter she names Anna. But it’s apparent that something is terribly wrong, and two days later, Anna dies, plunging Cregan into suicidal despair. Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on and attempts to make sense of this pivotal experience. Weaving together literature and research with details from her longburied medical records, she writes of her own ordeal and the still-visible scar of a suicide attempt—while considering it as part of a larger history of our understanding of depression. She investigates the treatments she underwent, from hospitalization and shock therapy to psychotherapy and antidepressants. At once intimate and scholarly, The Scar illuminates a too often stigmatised affliction with compassion and intelligence and offers hope to all those who are still struggling.

"A searingly honest and riveting book … This is a book that will really matter to anyone who has been through the experiences of depression. What makes the book stand out is the sheer clarity of the writing, the personal fragility and the wrestling with demons emerging here with a kind of grace, a hard-won heroism." - Colm Toibin

"[Sufferers of mental illness] can tell us about it in raw narrative form. But they cannot be trusted to interpret it through research and scholarship and all the disciplines that require a cool and methodical objectivity. And this of course is deeply wrong. For many, many travellers do indeed return from the country of the deranged mind. If, like the Irish-American writer and academic Mary Cregan, they are scholars and thinkers, they return to those very disciplines. Yet how are they to write? Subjectively within the frame of memoir – this is what happened to me? Or objectively within the frame of academic expertise – this is what my experience means when seen through the lens of history, literature and culture? It is very difficult, and indeed quite subversive, to do both at the same time and it is Cregan’s ability to manage it that makes The Scar so remarkable and so important." - The Irish Times

"Cregan writes lucidly of her illness and offers hope as well as valuable insights for those living with depression." - Publishers Weekly

"In providing kinship to its fellow traveler, The Scar becomes the best sort of memoir — one that serves a higher purpose." - Los Angeles Review of Books