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From the internationally acclaimed author of An Unquiet Mind, an exquisite, haunting meditation on mortality, grief, and loss.
Perhaps no one but Kay Redfield Jamison—who combines the acute perceptions of a psychologist with a writerly elegance and passion—could bring such a delicate touch to the subject of losing a spouse to cancer. In direct, straightforward, and at times strikingly lyrical prose, Jamison looks back at her relationship with her husband, Richard Wyatt, a renowned scientist who battled debilitating dyslexia to become one of the foremost experts on schizophrenia. And with her characteristic honesty, candor, wit, and simplicity, she describes his death, her own long, difficult struggle with grief, and her efforts to distinguish grief from depression.
But she also recalls the great joy that Richard brought her during the nearly twenty years they had together. Wryly humorous anecdotes mingle with bittersweet memories of a relationship that was passionate and loving—if troubled on occasion by her manic-depressive (bipolar) illness—as Jamison reveals the ways in which her husband encouraged her to write openly about her mental illness and, through his courage and grace taught her to live fully.
A penetrating psychological study of grief viewed from deep inside the experience itself, Nothing Was the Same is also a deeply moving memoir by a superb writer.
Much of Nothing Was the Same is an account of this dance with impending death and its aftermath. Inevitably, it will be compared to Joan Didion's memoir of her husband's death, The Year of Magical Thinking. But Nothing Was the Same is a very different kind of book, told with less writerly detail than Didion's but more direct emotion…In this slim, intense memoir Jamison shows us that mourning leads us back to life.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
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Benjamin Andrews
reviewed Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir on March 26, 2011
Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir
Jamison is on my radar as a prominent person with a disability, though she has never explicitly articulated a disabled identity. Her An Unquiet Mind is a hugely important book, politically speaking, and I salute her for outing herself as someone with severe bipolar, and effectively painting a target on her back for religious nutjobs and many of her ablest asshole colleagues in the medical profession. I mean, what the hell do I know about being targeted in wank, compared to that?
This book, though . . . *shakes head*. It's a memoir of her husband's loss to cancer. I picked it up for blah personal reasons blah, and also because it was supposed to be about her struggle to distinguish the grief processes from the organic, chemical misfunction of her illness. As a mental health professional and a person with a mental illness, she could really get at this fascinating thing - distinguishing useful emotion from pathological, talking about the biological processes of intense emotion from the inside.
Yeah no. The book is about that for roughly two pages. The rest of the time it's an extended obituary, and not a very interesting one. By which I mean that I'm glad she wrote it, because I absolutely get how important a process that can be. I just don't know why it needed to be published.
The book is mostly about her husband, how wonderful he was, how much she loved him. And then he dies, and it sucks. You'd think, hey, grief is universal, but no. this book isn't about grief, it's about Jamison delivering a long eulogy to someone she loved that almost none of her readers will know. And it's all told in this ponderous, stylized, cinematic mode, all 'and then he dipped the ring in the North Se and put it on my finger.' Lots of tell, everything was so romantic and intensely meaningful, you know. I'm sure these things actually happened, but the book has this roseate glow of recollection to it that precludes the more complex, the emotionally analytical, the clarity of insight I expect from Jamison.
Like I said: glad she wrote it. She clearly needed to. I just don't see what anyone else reading it will get from it.
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