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Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


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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