Review: Trendy Tears of the Modern Mope (A Review Of Depression Cooking By Sonali Menezes)

By Hugh Blanton

 

It's been said that depression is a disease of the rich—poor people simply don't have time to indulge in it while out hustling and working and trying to keep the bills paid. However, in recent years, depression has become trendy (sort of like celiac was in the early aughts) and Zoom therapists, mental health apps, SSRIs, and other drugs have become almost like precious collectible items. In Sonali Menezes's book Depression Cooking, she puts her myriad of drugs out on parade for the reader to sit in awe of: Bupropion, Divalproex, Seroquel, Latuda, Wellbutrin. The book is part memoir, part cookbook, completely self-indulgent. Menezes rails against the patriarchy, capitalism, and, of course, climate change. She does all this while giving us recipes for things like instant ramen and mac & cheese for people who are too depressed to cook a full meal. "Eating out, convenience foods, prepared foods, no-cook foods, and yes, even a bag of microwave popcorn constitute depression cooking," she tells us early in the book. One can't help but wonder if it's the junk food and handfuls of drugs that are what's making her feel so lousy all the time.

 

Depression Cooking is something like a self-help book: "I find it an irony upon ironies that I am writing a kind of self-help book while hating the predatory nature of self-help books." It's nothing at all like the self-help books that were topping the best-seller lists of the 1990s, though, with their exhortations to exercise and eat a clean diet of whole foods. Menezes advises depressives, who are known for their poor hygiene, that it's okay to only shower every other day and to find a trusted friend to ask if they are starting to stink. If you go on a little long between trips to the laundromat, she's got these tips for you: "If you simply can't stomach an afternoon at the laundromat while men hit on you and you pretend not to understand English to avoid them, and you have no more clean underwear, try handwashing a couple of emergency pairs in your bathroom sink." And if you can't even manage that, she's still got you covered: "If things get desperate on the clean underwear front, for any reason, you can try flipping your underwear inside out and wearing them again." Menezes will undoubtedly move to the top of 'people-not-to-go-down-on' lists after publication of this book.

 

Being around depressed people can be wearying and Menezes seems to have enough self-awareness to know she's often a burden. (One of the reasons celiac faded from the scene was that the celiac's friends got tired of trying to find gluten-free restaurants and cafes to hang out in with them.) She mentions an ex-boyfriend who found her, once again, lying on the couch and crying. "'You're always crying," he began to raise his voice. "This has to stop!" . . . "All you do is cry. You just make me so fucking sad."' She realizes she needs to cultivate a relationship with herself:

 

Putting on a pair of fresh flannel pajamas, just as "Stacks" finished playing, I put aside my half-empty mug of tea, slid under the covers, and reached a hesitant hand into my pants, uncertain. I'm cultivating a relationship with myself. I cheered me on while my fingertips wound their way through my bush, first just twirling. How can I be 19 and never done this before? I started so slow. Slow enough that I yawned a couple of times at the tedium of it all but kept going. I stopped and rotated my wrist until it cracked and kept going. I'm cultivating a relationship with myself.

 

She then had a vision of Mary Mother watching over her.

 

Depression cooking's holy trinity is toast, mac & cheese, and instant ramen, Menezes says, and adds, "Fuck Emma W**** and any white vegan who will shame you into believing otherwise." She's probably referring to actress Emma Watson, known for her vegan advocacy. Menezes speaks often about the tribulations of living under white supremacy in Canada—after she and her brother and sister (they're triplets) graduated primary school they were sent by their parents to Mary West Catholic Secondary School: "We were leaving the mean, mostly white kids behind." After secondary school she enrolled in an undergrad art class. She made a sculpture that she titled "White Girls With Lattes" that made the white girls in the class, who all had Starbucks coffees in their hands when the sculpture was brought out for crit, rather uncomfortable. The professor said the sculpture appeared amateur and asked Menezes if she could have used higher quality materials instead of party-store glitter. Menezes replies, "I like to consider the process of covering an object in glitter as fossilization. As if I'm studying basic white girls, sort of like an anthropologist." She then goes on to point out that coffee comes from the Global South along with the spices for pumpkin spice lattes and asks, "So why have basic white girls claimed it?" The bell rung and her crit ended before anyone could answer.

 

Menezes includes crudely drawn comic strips and other drawings in Depression Cooking which adds to the book's bratty-child tone. Despite her plaints about capitalism and basic white girls she seems to know she really doesn't have it all that bad: "I can't say for certain what I was sad about. Perhaps it was the devastation upon realizing that my life had barely started, that I was, by so many metrics, very lucky, and yet life felt too hard already somehow." She mentions that at the start of the pandemic her roommates kicked her out of their house. She doesn't tell us why, but people who view life as "too hard" can be too hard to live with. Menezes wraps the book up with a list of "Hot Takes" that include "Moral purity is not possible under late stage capitalism" and "Therapy is not a luxury." Menezes is in her thirties, there's likely more memoirs from her in the future. It's a pretty safe bet to say that none of the drugs and therapy will have so much as knocked a dent in her depression.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.