Out of the Blue

An explosive memoir of workplace-related depression and recovery - the book the Globe, Manulife and Doubleday didn’t want you to see. Jan Wong, a journalist at the top of her game, wrote a story that sparked a violent backlash, including death threats. For the first time in her life she spiraled into clinical depression. Her newspaper accused her of feigning illness, and fired her.

For twenty years, Jan Wong had been one of her newspaper’s best-known reporters. Then one day she turned in a story that set off a firestorm of controversy, including death threats, a unanimous denunciation by Parliament and a rebuke by her own newspaper. For the first time in her professional life, Wong fell into a severe clinical depression. Yet she resisted the diagnosis, refusing to believe she had a mental illness. As it turned out, so did her company and insurer. With wit, grace and insight, Wong tells the harrowing tale of her struggle with workplace-caused depression, and of her eventual emergence … Out of the Blue.

Jan Wong divides her time between Toronto and Fredericton, N.B., where she is a professor of journalism at St. Thomas University. She is also a monthly columnist at Toronto Life magazine, where she won a 2011 National Magazine Awards silver medal for column writing, and a weekly columnist for the Halifax Chronicle Herald, one of Canada’s last independent, family-owned newspapers. Her latest book, Out of the Blue - a Memoir of Workplace Depression, Recovery, Redemption and, Yes, Happiness, will be published in May 2012. A third-generation Montrealer, in 1972 Jan became the first Canadian to study in China during the Cultural Revolution. In 1979, she became the first news assistant at the New York Time’s Beijing Bureau. She has worked as a staff reporter for the Montreal Gazette, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. From 1988 to 1994, she was the Globe and Mail’s much-acclaimed China correspondent and covered the 1989 massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. She later wrote about celebrities in her hugely popular “Lunch With” column for six years. She is a recipient of the George Polk Award in the U.S. for coverage of a money-laundering scandal at New England banks and a National Newspaper Award in Canada for her China reporting, among other honors. Jan is a graduate of McGill University, Beijing University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her first book, Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, was named one of Time magazine’s top ten books of 1996. It remains banned in China. She is also the author of Lunch With: Sweet and Sour Celebrity Interviews; Jan Wong’s China: Reports from a Not-So-Foreign Correspondent and Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found.