Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir, by Kay Redfield Jamison

In An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison wrote about her struggles with bipolar disorder. As a psychologist, Jamison brought an unusual combination of personal experience and academic and clinical knowledge to that memoir, and the result was a compelling and enlightening work. In this second memoir, she takes on the experience of grieving her husband's death; while the book is sometimes moving, it falls short of the standard set in her earlier work.

The first quarter of the book, titled "Assured by Love," is a discussion of life with her husband Richard. Suffice it to say she loved him greatly and his support helped maintain her mental health. Perhaps no one can describe their love in a way that carries much impact for someone else, but I found this section of the book unnecessary. The letters she has reprinted on the book's flyleaves tell us more than the 50 pages of narrative.

The second section chronicles Richard's multiple illnesses and death. Richard and Kay were sustained by the love of friends and the caring work of fine physicians. While the story is very sad, I'm not sure what it tells us about life and death that hasn't been said many times before.

The last and strongest section is about Kay's grieving and gradual healing. Here, she compares depression and grief in a way that is interesting, insightful, and likely would be helpful to someone who suffers from depression and wonders how he/she will be able to handle grief. In describing the grieving process, the specific details are the most telling (the failure of music to console, the impact of the letter from the Medical Board of California saying they had heard Richard Wyatt might be deceased, the solace provided by poetry).

While I do not discount the magnitude of her emotional experience, I wonder if Jamison might have distilled the best of the last section of the book into a very fine article. The book itself, while it tells a moving story, doesn't have the power of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (or even Joyce Carol Oates's essay in the recent Atlantic supplement--she will have a book out on her widowhood in February 2011). And perhaps if she had refined the book into an essay, we would not have had to read at least a dozen times that she was writing a book about exuberance (I know, I'm being really mean, but it got annoying!).

Favorite passages:

It has been said that grief is a kind of madness. I disagree. There is a sanity to grief, to its just proportion of emotion to cause, that madness does not have. Grief, given to all, is a generative and human thing. . . . Grief, as it transpires, has its own territory.

We put our faith in things great and small. We assign to them meaning they may actually have, or meaning that we need for them to have in order to carry on. I go to Richard's grave with flowers in my arms that I will to last, with orange tulips in one hand and a hammer to break the ice in another . . . I find pleasure that there is beauty near Richard, even though it does not last. It is a small thing, but it matters. I do not want him to be forgotten, or to be alone.