Events on Monday, July 16, 2012

When The Fight Started, Hear Jane Sing
6:00pm
Daniel Smith discusses and signs Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety
7:00pm
Book Soup

In the insightful narrative tradition of Oliver Sacks, Monkey Mind is an uplifting, smart, and very funny memoir of life with anxiety—America’s most common psychological complaint.

We all think we know what being anxious feels like: It is the instinct that made us run from wolves in the prehistoric age and pushes us to perform in the modern one. But for 40 million American adults, anxiety is an insidious condition that defines daily life. Yet no popular memoir has been written about that experience until now. Aaron Beck, the most influential doctor in modern psychotherapy, says that “Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.”

In Monkey Mind, Daniel Smith brilliantly articulates what it is like to live with anxiety, defanging the disease with humor, traveling through its demonic layers, evocatively expressing both its painful internal coherence and its absurdities. He also draws on its most storied sufferers to trace anxiety’s intellectual history and its influence on our time. Here, finally, comes relief and recognition to millions of people who want someone to put what they feel, or what their loved ones feel, into words. 

 

Potluck
7:00pm
Comedy Store

 Original Room

Steel Panther, Diamond Lane, Vera Mesmer, Without Warning
9:00pm

 $15

The Ding Dong Show
10:00pm
Comedy Store

 Belly Room