Rabbits for Food

On New Year's Eve, a writer sits at a restaurant table with her husband and their friends, wearing the paper hat the night demands. She is acerbic, quick with a joke and clinically depressed, and over the course of the dinner she comes apart completely.

The breakdown puts her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital. She turns down every treatment offered to her. Instead she fills her days by writing about the other patients, the people she calls "lunatics", and by working on a novel about the events that led her there.

The book is a comic novel about depression and institutional life, narrated from inside a mind that sees clearly and cannot stop commenting. The humor is dry and sharp, and it sits alongside loneliness and grief rather than covering them up.

The novel is Binnie Kirshenbaum's first in ten years. Its question is whether the writing will lead its narrator out of the hospital's depths or further into them.