Nothing was the same A memoir

Review by New York Times Review

FEW people have written about their experience of manic-depressive illness from the inside as acutely as Kay Redfield Jamison did in her 1995 memoir, "An Unquiet Mind." Among the things that distinguished that book was the fact that Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a co-author of the standard medical text on bipolar illness, knew the disease as both clinician and patient. Jamison's outing of her affliction involved considerable professional risk. Some of her colleagues recognized the advantage of her uniquely intimate knowledge of the illness she treated, but others believed it cast a pall over her professional judgment - a prejudice that would probably not have come to bear on a cardiologist, say, who happened to have undergone heart surgery. In her new book, "Nothing Was the Same," Jamison makes it clear that coming clean about her illness was a personal necessity, the release of an internal pressure that she could no longer hide. "Silence about mental illness bred a quiet ugliness and set in place the conditions for unnecessary suffering and death," she writes. "I had studied and written about depression and bipolar illness for 20 years.... If I couldn't be public about it, it was scarcely reasonable to hope that others would." It is fascinating to read "Nothing Was the Same" as a kind of sequel to "An Unquiet Mind." In the simplest of terms it is the story of the death of Jamison's husband, the neuropsychiatrist Richard Wyatt, from cancer in 2002, and Jamison's struggle to adjust to life without him. In a deeper sense, however, it is a tale of two diseases - one of the mind, one of the body - that alternately challenged their marriage. Remarkably, this seems to have strengthened their bond. Before their marriage, Jamison suppressed the more extreme aspects of her character in order to impose on herself a predictability that would permit her to negotiate the world without self-destructing. Wyatt provided her with the emotional scaffolding to reclaim her "fearlessness." Jamison writes of "one particularly turbulent period" during which Richard "made morning and evening ratings of my moods and recorded them on a chart. ... It built sufficient distance between him and my moods to help tame the beast." Reading this, I was reminded of how the psychiatrist Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" tries to care for his mentally ill wife by developing a detachment toward her that seeps fatally into their marriage. A devout rationalist, Wyatt found a way to keep science and love separate, careful not "to attribute to character what he knew to be disease." The marriage blossomed, even after Wyatt's cancer turned Jamison into the caregiver, navigating through the crashed hopes of his surgeries and checkups. 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. After Richard is gone, Jamison is left with her grief and the frustration of memory. Jamison uses her predicament to deliver a captivating riff on Freud's seminal essay "Mourning and Melancholia." As one who has experienced clinical depression, she is in a singular position to compare it with grief. A startling and essential difference between them: "In grief, death occasions the pain. In depression, death is the solution to the pain." Grief is given to all, depression only to those who are cursed with it. In this slim, intense memoir Jamison shows us that mourning leads us back to life. Michael Greenberg is the author of "Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father's Story of Love and Madness" and "Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 14, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In Touched by Fire (1993), Jamison analyzed the linkage of the creative, artistic temperament to bipolarity. She took great personal and professional risks with the follow-up, An Unquiet Mind (1995), in which she declared her own bipolarity. She now presents neither a milestone nor a public announcement but a unique account, filled with exquisitely wrought nuances of emotion, of her husband's death. Richard, who triumphed over dyslexia to become a renowned expert on schizophrenia, brought his humor and scientific mind to their bond, strengthening it even as she still had mood swings (not full-blown) while on lithium. She is grateful that he reminded her to sleep, for she knows the dangers of sleep deprivation: Mild mania has a way of feathering in and quickly escalating. After 10 years together, Richard's delayed reaction to Hodgkin's disease treatments in 1979 resulted in Burkitt's lymphoma, which required chemo, then stem cell transplant in December 1999. Feeling given back their future together, they were hit the following July by a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer, which began a quest . . . to save Richard and . . . navigate between false and reasonable hope. In her brilliant explication distinguishing between madness and grief, her battle to remain sane is as stirring as his to beat cancer.--Scott, Whitney Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Jamison (psychiatry, Johns Hopkins Univ. Sch. of Medicine) is the preeminent expert on bipolar disorder. While her elegant Night Falls Fast explored her own struggles managing the disease, this book conjures Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking with its testaments of love to a beloved husband who died of cancer (Richard Wyatt, former chief of neuropsychiatry, National Inst. of Mental Health). A superb read guaranteed to appeal to those who have survived the loss of a spouse, with insights into differentiating depression from grief. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/09.]-Lynne Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A manic-depressive clinical psychologist finds solace after the death of her husband. Redfield (Psychiatry/Johns Hopkins Univ. School of Medicine; Exuberance: The Passion for Life, 2004, etc.) stunned readers when she recounted her battle with harrowing mental illness in her 1995 memoir An Unquiet Mind. Continuing her journey, the author analyzes her life with celebrated scientist Richard Wyatt, who suffered the recurrence of Hodgkin's disease after 20 years in remission. Persistence and relentless ambition prevented a lifelong battle with dyslexia from impeding Wyatt's collegiate studies. He earned a psychiatric residency at Harvard and went on to become Neuropsychiatry chief at the National Institute of Mental Health. By the end of his life, he was considered a pioneer in the field. Jamison's manic mood swings caused friction early on in their romantic relationship, and though Wyatt was new to love, he cherished Jamison "in a way I never questioned." The ebb and flow of their often turbulent coupling was buoyed by unconditional devotion and extreme patience ("My rage was no match for Richard's wit"), and they married in 1994, only to have Wyatt's cancer recur five years later. Risky stem-cell transplants and high-dose chemotherapy afforded them added time together, but little more than a year later, the cancer took his life. Before his death, they spent languid days of quiet time pondering "only small and binding things." When Jamison admitted to sobbing "But what will I do without you?" and started to prepare funeral arrangements, her ordeal becomes overwhelmingly heart-wrenching. Alone and unmoored, Jamison amazingly skirted the pitfalls of her formerly depressive state and found clarity, managing to make peace with her husband's death. A soul-baring love letter to the author's loving life partner that also addresses the debilitating condition that restricted her from enjoying life to its fullest. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The love you gave me wasn't fresh and young, It didn't melt the sun or set the town aflame. But it was warm and wise as any street, Where hope and sorrow meet in bars without a name. I only know that one day was a drink And then the next was you and nothing was the same. --STUART MACGREGOR Prologue When I was young, I thought that fearlessness and an easy way with love would see me to the other side of anything. Madness taught me otherwise. In the wake of my first insanity I assumed less and doubted more. My mind was suspect; there was no arguing with the new reality. I had to learn to live with a brain that demanded more coddling than I would have liked and, because of this, I avoided perturbance as best I could. Needwise, I avoided love. I kept my mind on a short lead and my heart yet closer in; had I cared enough to look I doubt I would have recognized either of them. Before mania whipped through my brain I had been curious always to go to the far field, beyond what lay nearest by. After, I drew back from life and watered down my dreams. I retaught myself to think and to negotiate the world, and as the world measures things, I did well enough. I was content in my life and found purpose in academic and clinical work. I wrote and taught, saw patients, and kept my struggles with manic-depressive illness to myself. I worked hard, driven to understand the illness from which I suffered. I settled in, I settled down, I settled. In a slow and fitful way, predictability insinuated itself into my life, and with it came a certain peace I was not aware had been missing. Grateful for this, and because I had no reason to know otherwise, I assumed that peace was provisional upon an absence of passion or anything that could forcibly disturb my senses. I avoided love. This lasted for a while, although not perhaps as long as it seemed. Then I met a man who upended my cautious stance toward life. He did not believe, as I had for so long, that to control my mind I must first control my heart. He loved the woman he imagined I must have been before bowing to fear. He prodded my resistance with grace and undermined my wariness with laughter. He could say the unthinkable because he instinctively knew that his dry wit and gentle ways would win me over. They did. He was deft with my shifting moods and did not abuse our passion. He liked my fearlessness, and he brought it back as a gift to me. Far from finding the intensity of my nature disturbing, he gravitated toward it. He induced me to risk much by assuming a portion of the risk himself, and he persuaded me to write from my heart. He loved in me what I had forgotten was there. We had nearly twenty years together. He was my husband, colleague, and friend; when he became ill and we knew he would die, he became my mentor in how to die with the grace by which he lived. What he could not teach me--no one could--was how to contend with the grief of losing him. It has been said that grief is a kind of madness. I disagree. There is a sanity to grief, in its just proportion of emotion to cause, that madness does not have. Grief, given to all, is a generative and human thing. It provides a path, albeit a broken one, by which those who grieve can find their way. Still, it is grief's fugitive nature that one does not know at the start that such a path exists. I knew madness well, but I understood little of grief, and I was not always certain which was grief and which was madness. Grief, as it transpires, has its own territory. Excerpted from Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir by Kay Redfield Jamison All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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