And wait'll you hear this—I've written four novels. Seriously! And two of them were best sellers. My first novel, Postcards from the Edge, was adapted into a film directed by Mike Nichols, starring Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep, basically playing a sometimes better, sometimes worse, dolled-up version of my mother and myself.)

I could go on and on—because there are certainly a lot of other cool things. The coolest being that I'm the mother of this amazing daughter named Billie. She's my most extraordinary creation.

It occurs to me that I might sound as though I'm boasting. I promise you I'm not. It's just that ECT has forced me to rediscover what amounts to the sum total of my life. I find that a helluva lot of it fills me with a kind of giddy gratitude. Some of my memories will never return. They are lost—along with the crippling feeling of defeat and hopelessness. Not a tremendous price to pay when you think about it. Totally worth it!

But now that we've established that I’ve had ECT, I have a list that I thought I’d share. A list of the electroshock treatment gang who have also benefited from ECT.

I do this because I find that I frequently feel better about myself when I discover that we're not alone, but that there are, in fact, a number of other people who ail as we do—that there are actually a number of “accomplished” individuals who find it necessary to seek treatment for some otherwise insurmountable inner unpleasantness.