The 7 Books That Healed My Seasonal Depression

After a long winter, spring is almost in the world! Nothing could have prepared us for the what this past season would bring, but it always helps to have a few good books to sustain you. Here are books that I read this winter to aid the seasonal blues.

Written by Aatia Davison

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Blue Nights refers to a period between summer and fall when evening takes on extraordinary color. The days get shorter, colder too. Blue Nights is Didion’s memoir of her life with her daughter cut tragically short, and it’s a follow up to her other memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. Here she reflects on her experience as a wife and mother to Quintana Roo, and her life was really something! A former editor at Vogue and wife of a Hollywood screenwriter, Joan Didion rubbed elbows with a number of famous figures and she does not hesitate to name drop. Didion’s writing is solipsistic. Her grief makes her repeat herself; she is self-referential and asks herself maddening unanswerable questions. “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.” I found this quality in her writing comforting at a time when I could hardly get out of my own head.

Didion quotes herself, “‘When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children,’ I said that.” The author died last year at 87. Her daughter would have been 56 in March.

Affirmations For Turbulent Times by Sarah Peyton

I gave this small book to a friend this past Christmas. With its small size and buttery smooth hardcover, it’s a gratifying object to hold and a lovely gift.

I loved the passages on Brain Change:

When the reader wonders, “are you surprised by brief moments of comfort inside your own brain? Are there times now when your brain stops its relentless self-evaluation and just lets you exist?”

The affirmation is, “I greet myself with warmth in the morning when I wake up. I am shame resilient and affectionate with myself when I make mistakes.”

I love this. In winter, there are, of course, moments of real clarity and pleasure, where the fog seems to lift. In the past, I have overanalyzed these moments, trying to capture them and pin them down. I wrestle for control over the moment, the quality of it and how long it lasts. Instead, the affirmation encourages good feeling to just be.

Winter by Ali Smith

Ali Smith deserves more US shine. Her books center on contemporary issues in the United Kingdom, and they are uniquely British. Still, there is so much to take in with every novel she writes. Cultural context matters, but Smith weaves such complex stories that you can enjoy them no matter your familiarity with British culture.

Winter is the second book in Smith’s seasonal quartet, following Autumn and preceding Spring and Summer. Autumn was nominated for the Booker Prize. The series focuses on post-Brexit England, where tensions are high and the future feels uncertain, but the content of the stories is (conversely) mundane. They are stories of family and loss. Smith’s prose is fantastic. The writing is meandering, playful and sometimes non-sensical. If I could, I would listen to her read her entire backlist in her Scottish accent.

Wintering by Katherine May

Wintering begins with a poem, Thaw by Edward Thomas.

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed

The speculating rooks at their nests cawed

And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass,

What we below could not see, Winter pass.

Is it a comfort to remember that winter is just a season? Not always. Summer will come as it always does and bring its own troubles–unbearable crowds, the heat, the stink. The promise of summer isn’t always a comfort, not to everyone, not to me. The birds in the tree tops don’t cry out in celebration of Winter’s passing, they only watch passively as it goes. Wintering invites readers to take advantage of the slowness of the season, its opportunity for retreat, a chance to slow down. Katherine May’s story focuses on a time when her husband was ill, her son stopped going to school and she was dealing with her own illness.

Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King

The title story in this collection is the one. Mitchell is a 42-year old bookstore owner and divorcee. His daughter, Paula is keen to make a love match between her dad and Kate, a spirited woman who works at the store. Mitchell is reticent (Paula’s word) and unsure how to make a change in his life, especially when his marriage to Paula’s mother ended in such devastation.

“There was no reason why anything would be different, why he would be able to make anyone happier now. He was the same person. He’d always been the same person. He marveled at how in books people looked back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances. But he’d never been anything but this one self.”

Fans of The Storied Life of AJ Fickry will be charmed by this! This story is about new beginnings and breaking out of one’s shell, the loneliness of winter before the promise of spring. It ends so sweetly. The rest of King’s stories share themes of complex relationships, coming-of-age and parenthood.

Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith

In Glaciers, Isabel, a woman in her twenties cares for old things. She’s captivated by the natural world, found objects and old photos, taking place in the span of one day, Glaciers moves between Isabel’s present and her memories. An Alaska native living in Portland, Oregon, Isabel a dreamy young woman who fantasizes about far away places. Glaciers is a meditative work of fiction, filled with beautiful descriptions. Reading this book this winter, I was enchanted by Isabel’s perspective. Isabel recalls seeing a cockroach in a restaurant she continues to frequent. “Whenever Isabel recounts the story, people are astonished that she returns to eat there... but there is something about the place that she finds cozy and private... ” Ordinary moments, even inconveniences, have charm, and a memory is transformed when relived in the present.

If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino

This book is a love letter to reading. It is not a novel but ten novels in one, each section beginning a new story, in a new tone, with a supposed new author.

“It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences… but not you.”

Maybe winter has infinite possibilities contained in the season. For all of its darkness and all of my hermetic tendencies in winter, I found that by focusing on comfort, on the good of the season, winter’s magic, I was happier.