Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

By Juliann Garey

A studio executive leaves his family and travels the world giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he's been forced to hide for 20 years.

“You won’t be able to put down this exhilarating debut novel... brave and touching.” 
—Marie Claire

In her tour-de-force first novel, Juliann Garey takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd—a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter for a decade to travel the world, giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he’s been forced to keep hidden for almost 20 years. The novel intricately weaves together three timelines: the story of Greyson’s travels (Rome, Israel, Santiago, Thailand, Uganda); the progressive unraveling of his own father seen through Greyson’s childhood eyes; and the intricacies and estrangements of his marriage. The entire narrative unfolds in the time it takes him undergo twelve 30-second electroshock treatments in a New York psychiatric ward.


From the Hardcover edition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781616951306

Reviews for Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

[downtownlibrarian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Vivid portrayal of bipolar disorder. Absorbing, horrifying, and empathy-creating. Not universally liked in my book club.

[robinwebster · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was hoping for an authentic bipolar narration, and although the character's actions may have rung true, the narration itself did not. I got bored and didn't finish.

[julia.reeb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

excellent; highly recommended

[selinalynn69 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a good representation of what a bipolar/manic depressive person feels like. throughout 12 sessions of electroshock therapy Greyson relives his past. From his childhood, to his wife, and then to his free flowing bipolar episodes. Despite the fact that this is fiction, it is honest and brutal. Knowing firsthand the effects of bipolar I cried at the end of the book-an instant sign of a good book. The emotions are raw and realistic and lends the story credibility. If you have ever wanted to get inside the head of the torture a bipolar thinks and feels, pick up this book.

[eembooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel of mental illness is unlike any I have ever read. The journeys of people with terminal or physical disabilities are numerous but the destructive thoughts which compel anyone with bipolar disorder are exhausting and sometimes disgusting to observe. Eventually the person drives everyone away. I had to keep reminding that this is a woman author who brought a man named Greyson Todd to the pages and made him both believable and sad. A book not be missed.

[lovestampmom · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I heard this book is Juliann Garey's first book. If the above statement is true, she truly has a gift in writing...or she just know bipolar disorder by heart. I usually avoid books about mental illness, especially the memoir type, but I'm so gracious I stumbled upon this gem, albeit the difficult subject matter and the sadness it brought upon me.

In the beginning of the book, Greyson Todd, a successful Hollywood lawyer turned movie producer, was leaving his home, wife, and daughter in the middle of a normal day, without saying a good bye...

to be continued.

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

No. No. No. Not worth reading, I decided at about the half way point. OK, it's about mental illness, but even taking that into account and the bizarre content you'd expect from that sort of story, I found this to be self-indulgent crap. But maybe that's just because I'm too conventional. I expect this author is a 'creative writing' professor somewhere.

[seven.stories.press · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Spot-on exploration of the first-person experience of having a mental illness, though some of the main character's experiences do seem a bit far-fetched. Also I'm not entirely convinced that his illness would need to be kept such a secret in the movie business or -- if it did -- that it could have been kept such a secret given its severity.

Also some of the jumping back and forth was disjointed and erratic, which I suppose lends itself well to the subject matter but ultimately left me wanting less of some scenes and more of others. The wife, Ellen, is remarkably one-dimensional, and I find the daughter's sudden appearance to be a bit too convenient (not to mention unlikely -- how many 19-year-olds abandoned by their fathers do you know wouldn't be angry?).

Also, a contributing factor to my four-star rating (perhaps unfair, but this should have been caught and really left me wondering what else the author got wrong in the small details): the protagonist checks into the McBurney YMCA, which is on 14th St. Later, he talks about looking out his window down onto 23rd St. As far as I know, the YMCA residences don't extend that far north (nine blocks is a pretty long distance of expensive Chelsea real estate).

[botkin05 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's crazy that this book is not a memoir because it reads like one. The reader gets to know the thoughts and feelings of the main character so thoroughly that it can only be written by someone who has experienced everything in the book. Except that its not a memoir and that doesn't take anything away from reading this book. Mental illness is hard to understand if you haven't experienced it - this book gives the reader a good idea of what it looks like from the inside.

[kelslynn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A novel about mental Illness, specifically about bipolar disorder. Todd Greyson has spent 20 years being a successful studio executive in Hollywood, all the while covering the fact of who he really is and what he really wants. He just simply walks out o his wife Ellen and his young daughter Willa. His adventures are separated by his ECT treatments, which are short in length but leave him with loss of organized memories. He is told to think something pleasant as he undergoes treatment, so we learn of his travels all over the world, his relationship with is father, his psychosis and mania and depression.I think the author is right on with is feelings of fading away, of panic, of euphoria, of sluggishness from the lithium, of many ot the problems with which bipolar people live every single day.The book didn't make me happy, but I felt I looked mental illness in the face.

[thereaderscommute · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Here's the review that I posted on my blog, The Reader's Commute:I requested a copy of Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See through NetGalley, and I'm happy to be sharing my review of it with you today.Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See is the debut novel of Juliann Garey. It should also be noted this this novel received the title "Best of the Month" on Amazon for December of 2012, a distinction this book certainly deserves. While I'm sure the subject matter is not for everyone - I urge you all to read Garey's debut novel to experience some truly gorgeous writing.Greyson Todd is at first a protagonist who is sarcastic, if sad. He recounts the moment he abandons his wife, Ellen, and daughter, Willa - driving away from their California home after cleaning up the backyard. No goodbyes. As the narrative progresses (and regresses, in a way that is frighteningly-realistic), we as readers are privy to the truth about Greyson: he is suffering from the same mental illness he watched his own father succumb to.Garey's debut novel is a stunning portrait of bipolar disorder - how the suffering affects the individual and their world around them. As I read my e-book, I found myself highlighting entire passages and pages. I found myself heartbroken, feeling for Greyson and his family. I felt powerless to stop their pain."...That's how it happens. Like a broken record, warped and scratched. Once I was music, now I am just noise." I'm finding it difficult to discuss the specifics of what I loved about this book. There is a sad love story unraveling in these pages, and family drama, and adventures that take you halfway around the world. There is danger, and violence, and so much confusion. What it comes down to is this: This book is a feeling. It makes you feel overwhelmed and it makes you reevaluate. And even if it doesn't have the "Hollywood ending" you may be hoping for (Greyson himself hates sappy Hollywood endings), it makes you appreciate the life that you have. It makes you hopeful for some kind of future.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I think this book has a greater impact when someone you know, either a friend or family member has had to deal with a mental illness. Unfortunately I am very familiar with bi-polar illness, so I found this book very real. The structure was unique, the character in the book has 12 ECT treatments, and during each of them we learn a little something more about him. His youth, how he became successful and than basically threw it all away, actually lost it because of his illness and faulty thinking and how he came to be in the hospital having these treatments. In a way I felt that the bouncing back and forth, instead of presenting his life in a linear fashion, kept the reader from really identifying and getting close tohim as a person. It was, however, a very good book and one that I found at times chilling. ARC from NetGalley.

[cathgilmore · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It requires a special gift to bring forth a largely unlikable character who can also evoke sympathy but Juliann Garey has done just that in her debut novel Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See. Greyson Todd is from one of the most unlikable genres of men in fiction and movies—a successful Hollywood executive (why limit ourselves, no one likes them in real life either). His success means he has a lot of money and a lot of ways to waste it—booze, drugs, women. He isn’t particularly nice to his wife, and his daughter is a bit of an afterthought. He’s intelligent and funny and makes a good party guest until he disappears under a neighbor’s beach house because he is certain that his vanishing footprints in the sand indicate that he too is vanishing. And, in a way, he is. After twenty years of managing his bipolar disease behind a Stanford law degree and a Hollywood career studded with Oscars, he is realizing that the noise inside his brain is making it impossible to front his act. So, on a September evening after he cleans up the dog poop in his yard, he gets in his Mercedes and leaves his wife and daughter behind.I have to get out of here. Now. Where I go and what time I get there are largely irrelevant. I am never in the right place. The present, here, is just an anxious pit stop I make between memory (which is to say regret) and the dreadful anticipation of hoping there will be better but knowing it won’t. His fractured, hyperkinetic travels take him to Kenya, Rome, Santiago, and Israel. These exotic locales are spliced together with scenes from his childhood and bits of his past as a student, husband, father, and successful Hollywood executive. Garey packages Too Bright into the twelve electroshock therapy sessions he undergoes after mentally and physically crashing. Doing so gives us twelve chapters, each one beginning with the soothing intonations of a nurse (‘relax, think happy thoughts’) as he is sedated and a structure one might expect as voltage courses through the brain and memories are retrieved and discarded at random.Too Bright is compulsively readable. Todd’s highs are all-inclusive junkets into fantasy land where money will buy a sort of happiness, if happiness is an unending supply of booze and very young girls. Identities can be put on and shed like clothes. Todd’s mind is a super-computer and his banter charms. Even if one is wary of his energy, there is still amusement to be had. Right up until he crashes, at which point, there is sympathy. This guy may be a complete jerk but no one deserves this kind of pain; a mental and physical anguish so great that one wants to remove it by force.Garey subsumes the reader in Todd and it is hand-over-a-flame irresistible. Someone else’s hand and you’re watching and you should be appalled but he’s laughing so it’s all right, right? Or is he crying? Her touch in playing out the events of Todd’s life from the innocence lost of childhood to the cynicism of having it all is deft. Her words are tender and tough, shocking in Todd’s ennui at what his money buys for him, and heartbreaking as we realize that he knows exactly how lost he is. She writes through Todd’s highest highs with panache and when he comes to rest after the last of his ECT sessions, she gives him back his humanity in slow sentences that reflect a mind so damaged on the way to healing it is uncertain if it will ever come back. In Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See Garey takes us on a journey of mental illness that is deeply unsettling at the same time that it entertains, making it one of my favorite books of the year.

[toobusyreading · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Based on his actions, Greyson Todd isn't an easy person to like but this author made me like him anyway. He is one of the Hollywood big rollers, has a great wife and child, and throws it all away. Or more accurately, his mind makes it all go away. To put not too fine a point on it and to be politically incorrect, he is someone that a generation or so ago would have been called crazy as a loon. Now he is just one of the many bipolar people trying to live in society.The story skips back and forth in time, often told when he is in a fog after he has finished his ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) treatment. Drugged, memories gone, hoping for his life back but not really expecting it, how very human he was.I knew I was going to like Greyson when he told about catching a fish as a child. His father, someone with his own set of similar problems and who became a big problem in Grey's life, was also at one of his best moments then.There were bits of the story that I hated. The sex trade involving young girls in Bangkok – I hate reading about that even in fiction because I know there is truth behind the fiction. The book had language some will find offensive. In places the story is rough and crude and nasty.What I loved about the story is that it gave me a glimpse into the mind of someone who is severely bipolar. It tried to explain the logic behind acts that seemed completely illogical. The story moved at a good pace, and the characters were certainly interesting. This book may have been rough and strong and not always pleasant but it was never boring.Thank you to the publisher for giving me an advance reader's copy for review.

[suetu_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“The lie I have been telling for twenty years.”The lie that Greyson Todd has been telling for twenty years is, "I'm fine." He is not fine. He has bipolar disorder type I, which first presents in his early twenties, shortly after he gets married. These are facts that readers will glean along the way of this non-linear novel, most of which takes place in Greyson's mind in the fleeting moments that comprise twelve 30-second electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments in the present day, New York circa 1994.While Greyson's memories roam freely from his childhood until near the present day, the pivotal event of the novel is relayed in its opening pages. It is 1984, and Greyson, a successful Hollywood studio executive, walks out of the house, leaving forever his wife and eight-year-old daughter. After years of struggling to keep it together, he loses the battle. Mixed in with older memories, readers will follow Greyson through the exotic wanderings--Rome, Israel, Santiago, Thailand, Uganda--that will comprise the next decade of his life. And readers will bear witness to his decline into ever-worsening mental illness.Debut novelist Juliann Garey wisely allows readers to grow fond of the relatively stable Greyson before she pushes him off the deep end. He's an accomplished, intelligent, and very likeable man at his best. A friend's father calls him a "mensch" when he's still a boy. And his own father, with whom he has a complex relationship, at one point tells him, "Greyson, you are very lucky. Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are... bland, tasteless. They'll never understand what it's like to read a poem and feel almost like they're flying, or see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart. It's not a weakness, Grey. It's what I love about you most."It's easy to quote from the novel. Garey has filled it with little snippets like, "I am undergoing a single-malt baptism." Or passages like, "I close my eyes and breathe in one more time. And then I know--the church smells just like our dogs' feet, like the warm, soft spaces in between their toe pads. I never would have known the pleasures of that particular comfort except that once Willa made me put my nose there. After that, I did it all the time. When no one was around. Dog huffing."The characters that need to be are well-fleshed. Every other character is filtered through Greyson's perception of them. And the language is a pleasure to read. It's the story being told that's a lot more painful to take in. It goes without saying that mental illness is a nightmare. Former studio exec that he is, Greyson is wary of "the cheesy Hollywood ending." But as his doctor tells him, "...no one is handing you a happy ending. At best you're being spared a Shakespearian tragedy."

[samsattler · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Rightly or wrongly, readers expect that the central character of a literary-style debut novel usually will be of the same sex as that novel’s author. Juliann Gray, however, has chosen the opposite approach for her own debut. Greyson Todd, the protagonist of Too Bright to Hear, Too Loud to See is a Hollywood studio executive whose clients swept the 1974 Oscars. He is also a man who will walk away from it all just ten years later when his bipolar disorder finally becomes more than he can handle. Perhaps more interesting, is that the entire story occurs during the time it takes twelve 30-second sessions of electroshock therapy to be administered to Greyson. During the administration of, and recover from, those 30-second sessions, Greyson flashes back to events he experienced during his childhood, during his marriage and career, and to the ten years - beginning in 1984 – after he walked away from his family, finally abandoning himself to the disease that still defines him. As the novel’s narratives jumps back and forth in ten-year spurts, it becomes clear that, for decades, Greyson had only been postponing the inevitable. We learn what it was like for him to watch his father be destroyed by the same illness, and how little guilt he felt as he silently slipped out of the lives of his wife and little girl. Tellingly, because he felt he was doing his daughter a favor by leaving, Greyson felt worse about abandoning his job than about leaving his daughter fatherless. That Greyson is able to wander the world (Bangkok, Rome, Santiago, the Negev, Uganda) for most of a decade before finally crashing into ruin in New York City, is an achievement in itself. And, when he finally does crash, he does it big. But, despite the horrifying “treatment” endured by Greyson (hit-and-miss drug therapy, in addition to the ghastly electroshocks), the novel’s most effective comic moments tend to occur inside the mental hospital – and there are several of them. Too Bright to Hear, Too Loud to See is more than a novel about depression and nervous breakdowns; it is a book about the tragedy of losing one’s most precious memories, second chances, and the luck of the draw. Greyson Todd’s decision to get out of his little girl’s life may well have been the best gift he ever gave her. Would she return the favor by giving him a second chance? The greater question might really be, should see?Rated at: 5.0