Descent into madness

Andy Behrman was Superman. For a decade from the mid-Eighties, Behrman shone as one of the brightest stars in the Manhattan social firmament. He lived in fancy Upper West Side apartments, travelled the world, ran a multi-million-dollar art-dealing business, slept only three hours a night, made friends in high places and managed to hold down a long-term relationship. Which is all the more surprising when you consider that, for most of that decade, Behrman was also completely bonkers.

Electroboy is the story of Behrman's descent into lunacy and his subsequent slow recovery.

Misery memoirs have become two-a-penny in recent years. Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, Kaye Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind and Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon spring to mind, and there are others. But none, so far as I know, has focused, as Behrman does, on mania. Perhaps this is because manics are too busy being supermen and women to sit around working on their journals. Perhaps it's a recognition that it's hard to sympathise with someone who, superficially at least, appears to be having the time of their life.

And for Behrman, mania really did rock. A nice Jewish boy from the 'burbs, he gravitated to Manhattan well before the Bonfire had been lit and the Vanities still seemed pretty inflammable. It was a crazed world, and that suited Behrman just fine. He was determined to make a splash. With other people's money (there was a lot of it about back then), he tried to cut it as an independent film-maker. When that bombed, he got a job at Armani, working till the wee hours, snorting coke and procuring rent boys for visiting staff and customers. Before long, he'd become a hustler himself and was, among other things, paid by a theatre critic to masturbate over his reviews.

There's a nostalgia for the excesses of the Eighties in all this. Behrman's cool, clipped, present-tense prose evokes the brat-pack novels of Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz, except that Behrman's story is, we are told, true.

There were early chinks in the sleek Behrman chassis - the obsessive cleaning and counting, the faddish diets and exercise programmes, the $50,000 cash he kept in the freezer and the teasing suspicion in his own mind that all was not well with Andy Behrman. Forays to Upper East Side shrinks prove fruitless, though. One prescribes Prozac, which fuels the mania; another comes to the uneventful conclusion that Behrman has a narcissistic personality disorder - ie, he is no different from most New Yorkers. He gives up on a third, Dr Levitt, "because talking to him is like talking to a piece of Danish modern furniture".

In due course, it all goes horribly wrong. Behrman gets roped into selling forged paintings, finds himself indicted, tried, found guilty of conspiracy to defraud and dispatched to a community correctional facility for five months.

This is the watershed in Behrman's memoir. From here on in, the writing becomes less like a shopping list and more like a life as Behrman is forced to confront the hard fact that he can no longer reinvent himself through his mania and must submit to electroconvulsive therapy. It's only here - nearly three-quarters of the way through the book - that Behrman really comes into his own as a writer. His descriptions of the odd calm and dislocation of his post-ECT mind are mesmerising.

And so what began as a rather wispy concoction about a man who worries that his Ralph Lauren sheets don't match his Calvin Klein pyjamas cooks down into a more substantial and nourishing broth about a man who begins his adult life as Superman and has to struggle in order to become a man; a man whose resilience, honesty and lack of self-pity make this book a humbling and, in the end, rather uplifting read.