The Therapeutic Impulse and Its Discontents

When the writer Susie Boyt was twenty years old, her boyfriend died in a climbing accident. After the funeral, Boyt went through severe depression, struggling with a grief that she couldn’t readily articulate to others. Eschewing the sympathy of friends and psychiatrists alike, Boyt sought help from an unlikely source: from autumn, 1989, to summer, 1990, she watched “Judy Garland: The Concert Years” every day. As Boyt recounts in her 2009 memoir, “My Judy Garland Life,” communing with the eighty-eight-minute PBS special featuring some of Garland’s most famous performances was, for a time, her only solace—a near-religious “extreme daily psychic pain ritual” in the solitary confines of her drafty living room. The pathos of Garland’s ecstatic renditions enabled Boyt to begin to work through her grief. “We sat it out together,” she writes, “and it kept me functioning in a very modest way, until the experts came in.”