A Book in a Day

It has been a while since I read a book in 24 hours, but I just did that with Nothing Was the Same, a memoir by Kay Redfield Jamison. I got hooked on Jamison’s prose when I read An Unquiet Mind, which chronicles her struggle with bipolar illness. Nothing Was the Same is about the illness and death of her husband, Richard Wyatt. The book combines raw grief with an elegant reflection on that grief.

Jamison, a psychologist and professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, has studied the disease from which she suffers and she compares it with grief. Grief does not alienate as depression does, she says; grief is more useful. “Grief, lashed as it is to death, instructs. It teaches that one must invent a way back to life.”

Jamison takes you through her journey of abandonment and fear, and gives you hope that not only can people survive such journeys, they can even be transformed by them. “It is in our nature to want to hold on to love; it is grief’s blessing that we come to know that there are limits to our ability to do so.” To hold onto the love she has for her husband, she had to transform it. So she wrote this book. “I would write that love continues, and that grief teaches.” It did, and it does.