Black Box is a novel, not a true story. I was a liar as a kid and I am a fiction writer by trade and so my impulse in this book, as in each of my other books, was to use the images and ideas and emotions in my head to tell a story. And although Black Box is about depression, it is also about family loyalty and honesty and shame and love and denial and about the desire to save someone who is in danger, and who may or may not want to be saved. It is not an account of anyone's real-life experience, but the emotions are as truthful as I could make them.

        I started writing Black Box because a person very close to me was struggling through some difficult years in the valley of the shadow of depression, which (if you've experienced it, you know) affects not only the sufferer but also the sufferer's loved ones. Like other illnesses -- but more so -- depression can instill fear and bewilderment and isolation. Unlike other illnesses, depression often comes with an unexpected burden of enormous shame.

        The shame is toxic. It can keep people whose very lives are in danger from telling anyone about the danger they're in. (This is akin to standing at the edge of a cliff in the dark and being too ashamed to call out for light.)

       It can convince people who suffer from depression that they deserve to suffer or will always suffer.

        It can convince people who are in desperate need of human interaction to pretend they don't need to talk to anyone. I know teenagers who were hospitalized for depression but who were instructed to tell their grandparents and teachers that they'd been on vacation. I know people whose family members were hospitalized after suicide attempts but who, when asked how those family members were feeling, always answered, "Fine."

        "Fine" is not always the correct or appropriate answer. But because we are a culture of success -- and because we tend to measure ourselves by our status as soccer team captains, award-winning pianists, leaders of the youth group, scholarship winners -- we often find it difficult, when someone asks "So how are you doing?" to answer anything but "Fine." And our friends and families take note of our shame and are infected by it.

Whenever I drive along the highway and see the billboards about suicide awareness and depression, I take time to look at the faces of the people -- most of them are young -- who took their own lives. I look at their faces and I think about the suffering they went through (most likely accompanied by an abysmal loneliness) and then I think about their families deciding to allow those photos to be displayed on a highway billboard.

        Those families have taken the most painful, the most isolating, the most difficult and potentially shameful thing in their lives and they have blown it up and installed it on the side of a highway so that anyone driving past can see it; they are in effect saying, This terrible dark thing happened to us, but we don't want to be alone with it anymore, and so we make a gift to you of this picture in the hope that you will see it and recognize it and not be alone and ashamed if something like this, God forbid, should ever happen to you. These are people who have stopped pretending, and the bravery of those billboards always brings me to tears.

Black Box was a difficult book for me to write. At least one person I greatly trust told me that if I needed to write it, fine; but I should certainly never publish it. I thought about not publishing it, and I thought about whether I would be a bad person for wanting to see the book in print.

        Ultimately my decision to publish Black Box came back to shame and to isolation. I thought about the people I had met who were in pain but were pretending that everything was fine. And I thought, This is what books can do for us: they can acknowledge our experience and take the lid off our isolation and make us feel less alone. To me, books have always been a great source of comfort -- not because they allow for escapism (though that's certainly one of their benefits) but because they offer recognition. Face to face with other people, we might give in to the impulse to pretend that everything is "fine"; but when we open the cover of a book -- I'm talking mostly about novels here -- there is no shame and no need to pretend. Good fiction has never lied to me. When I immerse myself in a book I feel recognized and therefore relieved. I turn the pages and think, Yes, I have felt that too -- that loneliness and joy and anxiety and confusion and fear. When I read, what once seemed meaningless gains meaning, and I am not alone.

        That's what I hope for, from Black Box. I hope I've taken what felt painful and random and bewildering and, in sifting it onto the pages of this book, have created meaning. I hope -- whether you have experienced depression or not -- that you will recognize some part of who you are and feel acknowledged; that you will feel steadied by the imaginative solace a good book can provide.

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Copyright 2007 by Julie Schumacher