Exhibitionist

In the early days of the pandemic, Peter Mendelsund and his family traveled up to a secluded New Hampshire farmhouse to weather the chaos. There began his journey through a crippling and seemingly intractable depression - which differed in degree but not in kind from episodes that have recurred periodically throughout his life - that brought him to the brink of suicide. Relief came from an unlikely source: painting, something Peter had never contemplated doing before. And yet it became the thing that may very well have saved his life. Bleakly funny, profoundly moving, and - against all odds - truly inspiring, Exhibitionist is not just an account of a mind thinking through its own suffering in real-time, and of the author's reckoning with his father's tortured legacy; it's also the story of the birth of an artist, and a portrait of an artist at work.