I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Praise

“I adore this book. . . . I continue to marvel at how Greenberg makes visceral the agony of psychosis. . . . [She] is not afraid to challenge the reader with a true view of the so-called sane world, to hold a crazy candle to reality, and to say, What can we see now? Is the darkness only inside, or is it outside, too?” ―Esmé Weijun Wang, from the Foreword

“A fearless coming-of-age novel . . . When I was 16 years old, I found a brittle mass-market-paperback edition of Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. . . . I inhaled the book . . . and, as one did, promptly shared it with a friend. . . . When I passed along my copy . . . I wasn’t making a statement about depression or mental illness. I was trying to share the story of a girl like the two of us, who is scared and lost, but survives. . . . I continue to take comfort in the power of Greenberg’s book . . . to have said things I couldn’t say. . . . Today’s teenagers have access to a much wider range of resources than I did to help them deal with the difficulty of adolescence. But they might still find something relatable, and useful, in books like Greenberg’s—which champions nonlinear journeys and tough, humane conversations about growing up. The enduring dignity it gives to so many facets of girlhood secures its place as a classic.” ―Lauren LeBlanc, The Atlantic

“Convincing and emotionally gripping.” ―The New York Times

“The life and wit in this book jump right off the page.” ―Vanity Fair

“Marvelous . . . With a courage that is sometimes breathtaking . . . [Greenberg] makes a faultless series of discriminations between the justifications for living in an evil and complex reality and the justifications for retreating into the security of madness.” ―The New York Times Book Review

“A rare and wonderful insight into the dark kingdom of the mind.” ―Chicago Tribune
 
“[Joanne Greenberg] is a living example of someone who refused the fate prescribed to her and chose instead to be many other things: clever, attentive, kind, iconoclastic, and the author of more than fifteen books on wildly varying topics. Her life as a recovered patient is not a glamorous or a tragic or a particularly scary one–but it might be a truer one.” ―The New Republic

“Captur[es] something about the peculiar anxieties associated with being young, and [offers] a lens through which to better understand the symptoms and complexities of mental illness.” ―Oprah Daily

“Striking . . . Provides an important step on that journey for us all . . . [to understand] severe mental health problems.” ―The Guardian

“A mov­ing nov­el of per­se­ver­ance against life’s strug­gles . . . [This] new edi­tion under the Pen­guin Clas­sics imprint . . . pro­vides a frame­work for more com­plex under­stand­ings of the nov­el—espe­cial­ly when it comes to its por­tray­al of men­tal health issues and Jew­ish­ness. . . . [It] facil­i­tates mean­ing­ful dis­cus­sion about the con­nec­tions between anti­semitism, gen­er­a­tional trau­ma, and men­tal health.” ―Jewish Book Council

“A gorgeous, hopeful story that deserves to be better read.” —STAT