Book Review: The Midnight Disease – The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain

By: Alice W. Flaherty

The cover caught my eye, the content blew my mind! This is an incredible book of deeply researched and experienced investigations of the creative mind and the troubles that prey upon it. The full spectrum of maladies of a writer from block to hypergraphia and too much writing is covered. The author is a neurologist and a writer, so her dissection of the writer’s mind comes from both a scientific and an artistic creative base. In the pages, Alice Flaherty reveals her own struggles with writer’s block and the journey of healing she undertook to balance her brain, understand its impositions on the writer, and give advice wrapped in a deeply knowledgeable text.

I found the need to read this book when I was highly alert as the rich content was deep and required my thought and process to discern the wealth of information. I have not struggled with either end of the writer’s spectrum and can’t say why I was drawn to explore it. For whatever reason I am all the wiser and take away a deep resolve to care for the writer within, for the brain that produces and the spirit that inspires.

Like a clockmaker who figures out how to make a clock tick the hours, Alice Flaherty has taken us into the depths of the mind to figure out what makes a writer tick. I recommend this book for its intellectual look at the process of writing.