“If mania is the turbo boost, then depression is the brick wall you slam into at high speed continually,” Seidler writes in his memoir. ‘My dad would just be “knocked out with the flu” for weeks at a time’: Jonathan Seidler. Seidler pulls at the black seam of mental illness that has threaded its way through generations of firstborn men in his family, and ultimately confronts his own diagnosis of bipolar disorder and the lifelong “chemical padding” he has had to accept to counterbalance the crippling lows with the “superhero” highs. It’s a Shame About Ray is also a story that vivisects a privileged, high-achieving family, with Australia’s most decorated architect Harry Seidler, Seidler’s great-uncle, being the most high-profile member. Seidler’s new memoir, It’s a Shame About Ray, is more than a tribute to a father who, in his words, “ate the apple whole core, pips and all” who once jabbed steroids into Beyoncé’s butt when she lost her voice just before a sold-out Sydney concert jumped into Sydney Harbour to retrieve his son’s Power Ranger toy and took on his teenage kids’ demerit points to the point he lost his own driving licence and had to ride a bicycle to the surgery for a year.
We found ourselves yanked out of our lives in a minute.” “I’ve had friends whose fathers have died of cancer, or have had any number of health issues in which there’s been a very slow and often traumatic demise, but the family gets to rally around and deal with it together. And I think that’s a different kind of grief,” Jonathan Seidler, Ray’s son, says. But with my dad, it really did come out of the blue. “You can usually tell when someone close is on that path, they’re really not very well, they’ve maybe tried before.
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