Call It a Difficult Night

“I was grateful for the death sentence the doctors gave me. It meant no more words, no more summons ringing out in hallucinations and fevers, an end neat as the edge of the world, where the sun drops into the sea. I walked through the world saying goodbye with a clean heart.” An institutionalized young woman remembers in sharp detail her disturbing childhood visions, which began at her American boarding school and worsened at university in South Africa. When she finally gets a diagnosis—temporal lobe epilepsy—she is told she will be either demented or brain dead by thirty.  Set during a short stay in a mental hospital, Call It a Difficult Night recounts her experiences with nurses, doctors, patients, and visiting friends, many of whom are more frightened by her state of mind than she is. She is defiant in her noncompliance and deeply suspicious of treatment, sure that her dangerous hallucinations are preferable to the dulling effects of medication and its theft of her creativity.  Brimming with empathy, observation, and lyricism, Mishka Hoosen’s fiction debut challenges the reader to reconsider their own definitions of trauma, identity, and “madness.”