"After one of her two dogs, a pug named Blossom, took a tumble off her back porch and died -- something for which Bamford blames herself, having removed a ramp connecting the porch to the yard -- her mood went permanently black. "I could not find any comfort at all -- just nothing, and for months," she says. "I felt terrible, and my brain felt terrible."
— Corbett, Sarah
Author
Date
July 17, 2014
Metaphor
"After one of her two dogs, a pug named Blossom, took a tumble off her back porch and died -- something for which Bamford blames herself, having removed a ramp connecting the porch to the yard -- her mood went permanently black. "I could not find any comfort at all -- just nothing, and for months," she says. "I felt terrible, and my brain felt terrible."
Metaphor in Context
In 2011, things were going well professionally. Bamford was getting regular voice-over work on television. She had starred in a popular series of preholiday ads for Target, playing an overhyped shopper. She was booking stand-up gigs as far away as Australia and playing larger and larger venues in the U.S. But her mind, as she puts it, had become like "an untethered jackhammer." Her energy soared and crashed. After one of her two dogs, a pug named Blossom, took a tumble off her back porch and died -- something for which Bamford blames herself, having removed a ramp connecting the porch to the yard -- her mood went permanently black. "I could not find any comfort at all -- just nothing, and for months," she says. "I felt terrible, and my brain felt terrible. In the past, I'd always been able to be like, 'Oh, I'll write in my journal or read my self-help book, or I'll call people and get out of this mood,' " she says. "But it wasn't a mood. It was like, 'Yeah, I'm gone.'"
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Sarah Corbett, "The Weird, Scary and Ingenious Brain of Maria Bamford," The New York Times (July 17, 2014). <Link to NYTimes.com>
Date of Entry
07/19/2014
