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Nothing Was the Same

A Memoir

Author Kay Redfield Jamison

Paperback

$16.00 US

Knopf | Vintage

On sale Jan 11, 2011 | 224 Pages | 978-0-307-27789-3

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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.

“A cleared-eyed view of illness and death, sanity and insanity, love and grief. . . . Spare. . . . Poetic. . . . Piercing. . . . The great gift Jamison offers here, beyond her honesty and the beauty of her writing, is perspective. . . . To write the truth with such passion and grace is remarkable enough. To do this in loving memory of a partner is tribute indeed.”–The Washington Post

“In An Unquiet Mind, Kay Jamison wrote with exceptional bravery and grace about living through mania, paralyzing depressions, and a suicide attempt. Here, with the same strength of mind and sweetness of spirit, she writes about her husband’s [death] as well as her own struggles with loss and grief. . . . Because Jamison understands depression so well, she is able to make the distinctions between depression and grief with great precision and sensitivity.”–The Boston Globe

“Fascinating. . . . Captivating. . . . As one who has experienced clinical depression, [Jamison] is in a singular position to compare it with grief . . . . In this slim, intense memoir Jamison shows us that mourning leads us back to life.”–Michael Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review

“A meditation on grief as necessary and inevitable, and not to be confused with mental illness. . . . Insightful. . . . Elegantly written. . . . It’s a credit to the warmth and intimacy of Jamison’s voice that we connect with her underlying message: Tragedy doesn’t discriminate.”–Los Angeles Times

“A wonderful book. Jamison has the ability to make love seem so real and reachable; her writing always makes me happy to speak and write the English language. It contains great beauty.”
–Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and South of Broad

“This is a finely told midlife love story, a romance as elegant as it is doomed. . . . What a couple she and her husband made! . . . Jamison writes simply and believably.”–AARP Magazine

“Sober yet heartening. . . . Jamison is at her most insightful drawing distinctions between [mental illness] and mourning.”–The Washingtonian

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.

KAY REDFIELD JAMISON is the Dalio Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as an honorary professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the coauthor of the standard medical text on bipolar disorder and author of An Unquiet Mind, Night Falls Fast, Exuberance, and Touched with Fire. Her most recent book, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Dr. Jamison is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She is a recipient of the Lewis Thomas Prize, the Sarnat Prize from the National Academy of Medicine, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. View titles by Kay Redfield Jamison