Reel lucky

Matthew Quick's novel about football and mental health, The Silver Linings Playbook, was turned into an Oscarwinning movie in 2012 and his newest quirky comedy, The Good Luck Of Right Now, was optioned for film even before it hit bookstores last month.

The 40-year-old writer is in the enviable position of having sold film rights for every one of his six novels, including the work-in-progress Love May Fail, to be published next year by Harper Collins.

Yet such successes are punctuated by struggles with clinical depression, which manifested when he was in his 20s and teaching high school in New Jersey.

"I still get depressed now and I'm doing what I love," he says in a telephone interview from his home in Holden, Massachusetts.

"It's just part of my brain chemistry."

Quick, or Q as his friends call him, is open now about his condition, but 15 years ago, as he taught high-school English literature and film, he absolutely refused to admit that he was not just unhappy with his career, but he was also clinically depressed.

"Coming from a blue-collar neighbourhood, you didn't talk about mental health. I would never have confessed it to anyone, even when my wife confronted me."

He is married to Alicia Bessette, 38, a pianist and composer, who also wrote the 2011 novel of baking and widowhood, A Pinch Of Love.

After The Silver Linings Playbook novel came out in 2008, he found old friends coming up and confessing their struggles with depression and other problems.

Realising there was an audience out there, and that the best therapy for him is "going to the page and writing fiction", he wrote four succeeding novels, each of which involves a protagonist struggling with something people find hard to talk about.

The Good Luck Of Right Now is about a 38-year-old man hallucinating about actor Richard Gere after his mother dies of a lingering illness.

It was among influential trade publication Publishers Weekly's top 10 literary novels this quarter.

The books before it include Sorta Like A Rock Star (2010), in which a homeless teen is traumatised when her mother suffers a violent tragedy; Boy21 (2012), which follows mob and racial violence in a dead-end town; and last year's Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock was a young adult novel about a teenager contemplating suicide.

It was listed in January among the year's best books by the American Library Association's young adult division.

In spite of the subject matter, the books are chock-full of humour and heart, much like The Silver Linings Playbook, turned into a 2012 movie directed by David O. Russell.

Last year, it netted a Best Actress Academy Award for Jennifer Lawrence and a Best Actor nomination for Bradley Cooper.

At the height of the hoop-la about the film, Quick began asking himself just why he had been so lucky.

"How did I find myself in this position? It's one thing to dream of being a fiction writer in LA, but it's another thing to shake David O. Russell's hand and meet Bradley Cooper," he says.

Before The Weinstein Company bought the film rights, Quick had been living for three years with his in-laws, having given up his high-school teaching job to pursue his dream of writing.

"I hadn't had a pay cheque in three years," he says and there was pressure from his parents to man up and return to being the breadwinner.

Quick was brought up in Oaklyn, New Jersey - his father was a banker and his mother, a housewife - and recalls feeling odd and alienated.

His male role models "didn't show emotion at all" and rarely read novels.

Life changed when his English teacher at Collingswood High School introduced him to writers such as Ernest Hemingway.

He went on to do his bachelor's degree in English literature and secondary school education at La Salle University.

He taught high school until 2004, before deciding he had to concentrate on writing, including doing a master's of fine arts in creative writing at Goddard College.

"It was a last-ditch effort to save myself," he says.

"I think teaching is a wonderful profession but I never wanted to be a teacher, I wanted to be a writer. I was telling my students that they should do what they love and I felt like a hypocrite. I felt as though I was dying."

He wrote several "practice" manuscripts that will never see the light of day, read books on how to pitch manuscripts and queried innumerable agents before finally hitting gold with Doug Stewart at Sterling Lord Literistic.

His tips for other struggling writers include "be polite".

"Say 'thank you' and 'please', you make alliances with people who can make the business end of things work for you."

Most important, however, is to take that first step and dare to write.

"If I hadn't made that leap, I don't know if I'd be here right now. Mental health-wise, I wouldn't even be here," he says.

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