DISCOVERIES

The Midnight Disease

The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain

Alice W. Flaherty

Mariner Books: 320 pp., $13 paper

“All the works of the spirit are made with corrupt bodies,” writes Alice Flaherty in “The Midnight Disease,” which is not just about the desire to write, it’s about the need to write. Flaherty, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, lost twins in a premature birth. After their death, she developed hypographia, the compulsion to write. (Her book is full of delightful disorders: hyperlexia, compulsive reading; graphomania, the urge to be published.) She was treated for depression, a condition, she notes, eight to 10 times more prevalent in writers than the general population. She discusses the links between writing and mood instability common in writers from Leonardo da Vinci to Dostoevsky and beyond, but her signal contribution lies in her mapping of the human brain to show how injury or abnormality in the temporal and frontal lobes affect writing ability. Whereas speech evolved 100,000 years ago, written language is just 5,000 years old. Writing is more fragile, “more likely to be affected by brain injury.” She writes about the depression caused by writer’s block and the various solutions attempted: brainstorming to fight perfectionism; improved sleep patterns; deadlines (which in fact hinder creativity), drugs (which she believes in but had little success with herself). Here is a stunning amount of research, presented in a personal manner both scientific and literary.

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In Fond Remembrance

of Me

A Memoir of Myth and Uncommon Friendship in the Arctic

Howard Norman

North Point Press: 166 pp., $21

“Memory is more a seance than anything,” Howard Norman writes, “replete with the desire to resurrect original presences and attendant emotions.” Norman was 28 when, in the fall of 1977, he went to Churchill, Manitoba, to translate the “Noah stories,” narratives by an Inuit elder named Mark Nuqac. On arrival, he found that Helen Tanizaki, a 39-year-old Japanese researcher, was already there on the same mission -- and dying of stomach cancer. “I hate that my illness put such boundaries on elation,” she would write to Norman before her death the next year. Helen’s motel room was filled with books, field guides and journals she kept on everything from birds to “incidents of choking in Inuit folktales.” She believed in reincarnation and often talked to Norman about which kind of shorebird she hoped to return as. Throughout his account of their short acquaintance, Norman weaves his translations of the Noah stories (given grudgingly, as Nuqac made no secret of his preference for the more experienced Helen). It’s a small book about a brief friendship, the memory of a time when the writer felt truly alive and fortunate to be in the presence of someone with a gift for living.

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Suburban Safari

A Year on the Lawn

Hannah Holmes

Bloomsbury: 262 pp., $24.95

“Having spent a number of years writing about the natural wonders in such exotic locales as Madagascar and Mongolia,” writes Hannah Holmes, “I thought it only fair to approach my new backyard with the same sense of discovery.” She spends a year researching everything that lives on her two-tenths of an acre in Portland, Maine, examining the lives of the birds (crows and catbirds are favorites), the insects, the chipmunks, the ragweed, the sumac. She pokes around in holes and investigates the lives of the Armouchiquois, who first inhabited her yard. She discovers why squirrels eat white oak acorns and store red oak acorns and how they tell the difference; how crows communicate; why dragonflies lock together in loops when they mate. Holmes’ backyard assumes strange, oversize proportions in the course of this fascinating book: the Bamboo Wilderness, the Insect Nation, the Freedom Lawn -- who needs Mongolia?