I haven't read this book yet, but I want to! Okay, okay, I know I'm breaking cardinal rule #1 of book reviewing, but I have a good reason: I read a wonderful review of Tracy Thompson, the author of The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling with Depression on Salon.com and it sounds like a great read. It'll be out August 8. I wanted to spread the word. Is that so terrible?

Here's how Salon introduces the book, first explaining that ever since Betty Friedan put a finger on the problem of mothers and depression in The Feminine Mystique, we are still struggling with a real diagnosis as well as a decent cure.

Enter Tracy Thompson, a former Washington Post reporter and author of a previous memoir about her pre-parenthood struggles with depression, "The Beast." Thompson set out to discover how common maternal depression was, and how it affects children, after suffering her own bout of post-motherhood blues. In her new book, "The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling With Depression," she expanded her personal story into the realm of parenthood by working with an Emory University psychologist to survey almost 400 mostly middle-class moms diagnosed with clinical depression who responded to queries posted in O: The Oprah Magazine and a number of newspapers.

Here are the statistics on depression in this country: 12 out of the 19 million sufferers are women, and most depressive episodes occur between the ages of 25 and 44.

So - what are many women doing between those ages? Right you are: procreating.

Thompson is not just talking about post-baby depression (or in our case on this board, post-adoption depression). She's talking about a depression that goes on longer, and perhaps may have gone on before, the arrival of the child. Here's what it looks like in many women:

Some mothers experience it as being very, very withdrawn and totally nonresponsive. The other symptom is hyper-irritability, and I have to confess, that's the worst thing for me. If I'm really, really depressed, I'm super-sensitive to noise and even happy noise is painful, and if the kids are fighting or something I just can't stand it.

Sound familiar? The hyper-irritable part sounds familiar to me. Of course my boys are super NOISY and Little J is very challenging...but I know that our lives could be so much smoother on many days if I could just bring myself to not be so annoyed by certain behaviors.

Go to part 2 of this review.