(In this courageous memoir, John Bentley Mays gives us a r...)
In this courageous memoir, John Bentley Mays gives us a riveting account of what it is to live in the shadow of debilitating depression. Weaving intimate recollections with excerpts from the diaries he kept for thirty years, Mays illuminates the struggle that leads to breakdown and the uneasy truce achieved through psychotherapy. Along the way, he offers provocative commentary on the allure of cure, the cultural scripts of normality, and the distorting mirror of clinical language. A literary tour de force that began with an award-winning essay, In the Jaws of the Black Dogs, is not an objective analysis composed from the safety of hindsight. It is a writer's attempt to evoke the silent and distorting malignancy - as well as the moments of reprieve - of the only life he has ever known. Above all, he offers readers hope: Although the black dogs cannot be entirely avoided, humor and the love and understanding of family and friends can keep the dogs at bay.
Power in the Blood: Land, Memory, and a Southern Family
(An account of the author's return to the South, after he ...)
An account of the author's return to the South, after he inherits his Aunt Vidalia's home and precious memories, details his rediscovery of his heritage and tracing his roots by journeying through Louisiana and South Carolina.
John Bentley Mays was a Canadian journalist and writer. Best known as an art and architecture columnist for The Globe and Mail, he also published a novel and several non-fiction books.
Background
John Bentley Mays was born in rural Louisiana on June 22, 1941, in Louisiana, United States to John B. (a plantation owner) and Anne (Smith) Mays. According to his biography, he was born “into an old family of cotton planters, small-town merchants and local politicians in the American S.” Both his parents died when he was a child, his father in a car accident and his mother of cancer, Mays and his siblings were raised by a succession of often neglectful relatives. Soon afterward began the symptoms of depression, which would affect him profoundly into adulthood. At the age of eight, he considered suicide.
Education
John Bentley Mays studied medieval literature and literary criticism at the University of Rochester in 1967-1968.
John Bentley Mays moved to Toronto in 1969 to accept a teaching job at York University and not long after resolved to become a writer.
Mays published his first novel, The Spiral Stair, in 1978. Soon after he was proposed a job at The Globe and Mail. Mays served as The Globe and Mail's art critic from 1980 to 1998.
In 1994 he published Emerald City: Toronto Visited, a collection of essays about Toronto architecture and history. In 1993 Mays wrote a candid magazine article about his experience with depression. A large number of responses from readers prompted him to write In the Jaws of the Black Dogs: A Memoir of Depression in 1995.
Much of In the Jaws of the Black Dogs discusses Mays’s various therapies. He describes his different attempts to cure his depression, and his final discovery of Prozac. At first. Mays thinks it banishes his depression, but later he realizes that for him, its effects are less than absolute. His continuing struggle with the disease makes him wary of therapists who enthusiastically promote Prozac as the answer, and Mays is critical of writers who suggest that depression is a sign of moral decay.
Mays’s long residence in Toronto was interrupted when his elderly aunt Vandalia died in Louisiana, passing on to him his memorabilia- and memory- filled childhood home. Once there. Mays decided to rediscover his southern roots. The 1997 book resulting from this quest. Power in the Blood: Land, Memory, and a Southern Family traces his American but not necessarily “southern”- lineage back to 1609 when an Anglican clergyman named William Mays arrived at the Chesapeake Bay. Mays’s searches took him to Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana. He found significance in tombstone epitaphs and family snapshots. The following year he left The Globe and Mail to become a general arts and culture journalist for the National Post, remaining with that paper until 2001.
In 2002 Mays published Arrivals: Stories from the History of Ontario, a book about Ontario history. The book won the Joseph Brant Award from the Ontario Historical Society. He also taught courses and gave guest lectures on architecture at OCAD University and the University of Toronto.
Mays died of a heart attack on September 16, 2016, in Toronto, just two weeks after having completed writing his second novel.
Mays had a long-standing interest in theology and Christian culture. He had chosen the Anglicanism of the American Episcopal Church early in his life. His 1998 conversion to Catholicism while on a working visit to Lourdes was unexpected.
Views
Mays came out as bisexual by orientation, although he noted that for personal and religious reasons he had chosen to remain monogamously married to his wife rather than exploring his attractions to men.
Personality
Alongside his courtly manner and deep kindness, Mays could sometimes be too fierce. His aspirations for art and culture were enormously high, his disappointments, when they came, seemed thunderous and deep.
Interests
Rooftop gardening, architecture
Music & Bands
Richard Wagner
Connections
John Bentley Mays married Margaret Cannon (a writer and columnist). They had a daughter called Erin.
Gold medal for science and medicine reporting, silver medal for personal journalism, and president’s medal for the best article to appear in a Canadian periodical, all 1993.
Gold medal for science and medicine reporting, silver medal for personal journalism, and president’s medal for the best article to appear in a Canadian periodical, all 1993.