Men & Mental Health

I Don’t Want to Talk About It

Terrence Real · 1997

Real’s central observation is that depression in men frequently does not look like depression. It looks like irritability, overwork, drinking, an affair, three hours of sport on a screen, a short fuse with the people at home. He calls it covert depression, and he traces it back to boys being trained early to disconnect from what they feel. Nearly thirty years old and still the book men are most often handed by someone who loves them. The title is the point.

The Descent of Man

Grayson Perry · 2016

Perry’s argument, delivered with a great deal of jokes, is that the traditional model of masculinity was designed for a world of physical labour and warfare that no longer exists, and is now mostly doing harm to the men carrying it. He is not scolding. He is genuinely curious about what a workable version might look like. Short, funny, and the easiest thing here to hand to a man who would never pick up a book about feelings.

How Not to Be a Boy

Robert Webb · 2017

Webb’s mother died when he was seventeen and he spent the next twenty years not talking about it, largely because he had absorbed a list of rules by about the age of six: don’t cry, don’t be a girl, drink, take it on the chin. It is a comedian’s memoir and it is properly funny, and then every so often it stops being funny for a page and a half and lands very hard. Excellent on grief that gets postponed for decades.

High Fidelity

Nick Hornby · 1995

Rob owns a record shop, is thirty-five, and copes with the collapse of a relationship by compiling top-five lists and reorganising his singles autobiographically. Hornby’s joke, which is also his subject, is that Rob has an enormous inner life and no vocabulary for any of it, so it comes out as taxonomy. A great many men read this and recognise the mechanism uncomfortably well.

Sad Little Men

Richard Beard · 2021

Beard was sent to boarding school at eight and writes about what it does to a boy to be separated from his family and taught that showing distress is the worst available option. It is specific to a British institution and it is also the clearest account anywhere of how emotional shutdown gets installed deliberately, as training rather than accident. Angry in places, which it has earned.

Mr Loverman

Bernardine Evaristo · 2013

Barrington Walker is seventy-four, Antiguan-born, London-resident, married for fifty years and in love with his best friend Morris, which he has never said aloud to anybody. Evaristo gives him a voice so alive that the book is a pleasure rather than a lament, and the question underneath it is the one this whole page circles: what does half a century of not saying the true thing actually cost a man?

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

Max Porter · 2015

A father and two young boys are left alone after the mother dies suddenly, and a large foul-mouthed crow moves into the flat to look after them. It is part poem, part novel, about a hundred pages, and it does something no straight narrative manages: it shows a man’s grief as chaotic and undignified and funny rather than stoic. Good for reading in fragments when a whole chapter is beyond you.