I Never Promised You a Rose Garden image number 0

The multimillion-copy bestselling modern classic of autobiographical fiction about a young woman's struggle with mental health, featuring a new foreword by Esmé Weijun Wang, the New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias, and a new afterword by the author

A Penguin Classic

After making an attempt on her own life, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a psychiatric hospital many hours from her home in suburban Chicago. Here she will spend the next three years, trying, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, to find a path back to her "normal" life, and to emerge from the imaginary Kingdom of Yr in which she has sought refuge.

A semiautobiographical novel originally published under the pen name Hannah Green just a year after Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar--a very different portrait of psychological breakdown--I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains, more than half a century later, a timeless and ultimately hopeful book, ripe for rediscovery by a new generation eager to erase the stigma of mental illness.

Item Information Item Information

Format: MassMarketPaperback
Author: Greenberg, Joanne
ISBN: 9780451160317
Condition: Used
Dimensions: 6.82 x 0.57
Number Of Pages: 252
Publication Year: 1989

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Maybe pass this one

HPB S. - 5 years 11 months ago

I couldn't get very far. It's hard to follow at times and very dull. I tried to read this in a book club and no one was able to finish it.
A teen girl who hides from life in her own world

Leslie S. - 7 years 1 month ago

I picked up a 1964 paperback copy of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden several years ago, quite by accident. Bored working in the security office on my college campus, I grabbed the book off the shelf to bide some time, and by the time I finished it, my world had been rocked. The main character, Deborah, is an extremely bright, extremely troubled 16 year old who is continuously thrown back and forth between reality and the dark, twisted, dangerously deceiving world in her mind, known as the Land of Ur. Every element of her story gripped me: from her relationship with the psychiatrist assigned to her case (and the doctor's real and gritty investment in Deborah's plight) to relationships with her fellow psych patients and her baffled, despairing parents. And, above all, the queer paradox of craving comfort and escape from reality, in an imaginary world set up solely to punish and humiliate her. With an ending that can only be described as...perfect, I can guarantee this is life-changing stuff here.
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Maybe pass this one

A teen girl who hides from life in her own world