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Start giftingToo Bright to Hear, Too Loud to See
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Learn moreIn her tour de force first novel, Juliann Garey takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd, a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter and for a decade and travels the world giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he's been forced to keep hidden for almost twenty years. The novel intricately weaves together three timelines: the story of Greyson's travels (Rome, Israel, Santiago, Thailand, Uganda), the progressive unraveling of his own father seen through Greyson's eyes as a child, and the intimacies and estrangements of his marriage. The entire narrative unfolds in the time it takes him to undergo twelve thirty-second electroshock treatments in a New York psychiatric ward. This is a literary page-turner of the first order, and a brilliant inside look at mental illness.
Juliann Garey has sold original screenplays and television pilots to Sony Pictures, NBC, CBS, Columbia TriStar Television, and Lifetime TV. As a journalist she has edited and written for such publications as Marie Claire, Glamour, More, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, and Huffington Post. She has received fellowships in fiction writing at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. Garey is a graduate of Yale and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Dan Butler, audiobook narrator, actor, writer, director, and producer, has had major roles on and off Broadway and has appeared in numerous television shows, including Frasier, House, and Monk. He cowrote and directed Karl Rove, I Love You and has appeared in such feature films as Crazy, Stupid, Love; Silence of the Lambs; Enemy of the State; and Fixing Frank, among others.
Reviews
“Greyson Todd is so utterly human…With the sheer force of her talent, Garey makes us want to look. And she makes us laugh. And she helps us understand and feel compassion.”
“Greyson Todd is the most fully-realized fictional character I’ve come across in a while…Garey doesn’t shy away from the depths of her character’s pain, but scenes that could easily become gratuitous in lesser hands are rendered with restraint and grace. She excels at leading us down the rabbit hole...Garey creates an atmosphere of exquisite tension.”
“A gripping tale of a man’s unraveling.”
“You won’t be able to put down this exhilarating debut novel…Brave and touching.”
“Brilliantly captures the effects of electro-convulsive therapy…[Garey’s] prose, with its mixture of the poetic and the profane, illuminates the psyche of a bipolar man, who seeks not a Hollywood ending but a restoration of the ‘glimmer’ of his faded past.”
“Juliann Garey writes with stark, lucid power about the tumbling journey into madness and the agonizing climb back out. Her electric prose trembles and her images vibrate at the edges, affording a rare and precious experience of the troubled mind from the inside out. It’s essential writing—terrifying, exhilarating, absurd, achingly human, and absolutely compelling.”
“Garey breathes life into an uncomfortable and often misunderstood subject and creates a riveting experience.”
“Garey evokes in stark detail the torment and raw suffering of mental illness. A compelling read.”
“A fine, sharp-tongued debut. Too Bright to Hear, Too Loud to See is a novel deeply wrapped around its subject, but it has its sights on grander themes—namely, how to survive in a world not made for you.”
“[Greyson Todd] is interesting and complex…We are deftly led through his erratic trains of thought, and suddenly we are with him in the irrational, sometimes violent place, and oddly, we understand how we got there.”
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