Nothing Was the Same [Hardcover]

Kay Redfield Jamison (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 15, 2009

From the internationally acclaimed author of An Unquiet Mind, an exquisite, haunting meditation on mortality, grief, and loss.

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The great gift Jamison offers here, beyond her honesty and the beauty of her writing, is perspective: a cleared-eyed view of illness and death, sanity and insanity, love and grief . . . 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
 
"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


"A unique account, filled with exquisitely wrought nuances of emotion, of her husband's death . . . In her brilliant explication distinguishing between madness and grief, her battle to remain sane is as stirring as his to beat cancer. "
"Elegiac and emotionally precise."
—Oprah Magazine
 
—Booklist (starred review)
 
"A soul-baring love letter. "
—Kirkus Reviews
 
"A superb read. "
—Library Journal (starred review)

About the Author

Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and codirector of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. She is also Honorary Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of the national best sellers An Unquiet Mind and Night Falls Fast, as well as Exuberance and Touched with Fire; the coauthor of the standard medical text on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; and the author or coauthor of more than one hundred scientific papers about mood disorders, creativity, and psychopharmacology. She is the recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards and of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (September 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307265374
• ISBN-13: 978-0307265371
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #596,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

83 of 90 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A most unusual book September 17, 2009

By Donald E. Graham

Format:Hardcover

This book is beautifully written. In keeping with Ms. Jamison's other books, it is an explosion of language unlike anything you will have read for a long time, all of it aimed at describing something very unusual in American literature: a happy marriage.

As readers of An Unquiet Mind will remember, Kay Jamison is an academic expert on manic depressive illness who is herself a manic depressive; her description of the illness in that book is the most vivid and understandable I have ever read.

I have been a friend both of Kay's and of her late husband, Richard Wyatt's. Knowing him did not prepare me for Nothing Was the Same. Richard was a man of great professional attainments and personal charm. Women will read about him and fall in love with his inconceivable thoughtfulness and powers of expression. Men will read about him and feel hopelessly inadequate (How could he so consistently say the right thing and come up with the right gesture? Who knows.)

It is hard to know who will pick up this unusual book. Those who do will enjoy it a great deal.

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a classic September 24, 2009

By Jeremy Waletzky

Format:Hardcover

"Nothing was the Same" is a jewel. Kay Jamison is a world renowned expert in bipolar illness whose personal struggle with the illness was brilliantly elucidated in her earlier memoir "Unquiet Mind". This sequel is about her relationship with her deceased husband Richard Wyatt, an outstanding schizophrenia researcher. It is a love story including illness and death, followed by mourning and healing. Opening the front cover, one reads copies of love letters exchanged between them at the start of their relationship. The letters are very revealing about their character and are an augur of what follows. Jamison's writing is precise, perceptive, witty, and very elegant. It is a joy to read. Great writing offers the opportunity of enriching one's personal experience by viewing the experience differently or in a more nuanced manner. My son died of a cocaine arrythmia eight years ago. Her description of mourning is elegant and helped me be aware of nuances that I would have previously been unable to express. "Nothing was the Same" deserves to become a classic book on mourning joining "A Grief Observed" by C.S. Lewis.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A writer with the soul of a poet and the knowledge of a psychiatrist October 11, 2009

By Story Circle Book Reviews

Format:Hardcover

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison's new memoir Nothing Was the Same is a love story like no other--two exceptional people, each doctors, each contending with a life-threatening illness.

At age seventeen Dr. Jamison was diagnosed with manic-depressive illness. She lived through mania, paralyzing depressions, and a mercifully failed suicide attempt. In her Prologue she writes that manic depression is a kind of madness, such that she was determined to "avoid .perturbance. (such as falling in love). She believed she needed to "coddle" her brain and modify her life and thus her dreams.

The renowned and charming scientist, Dr Richard Wyatt fell in love with her and she with him; they married and enjoyed nearly twenty years together until his sorrowful death from Hodgkin's disease. This brilliant scientist and beautiful human being had the added burden of dyslexia which required that he work four or five extra hours each day as he made his way through college, medical school, internship, residency, and his subsequent scientific career.

This stunningly well-written memoir is about grief...grief and the beauty and complexity of their relationship...a relationship that was doubly fraught with the common misunderstandings of two human beings due to the debilitating, threatening illnesses they each suffered. One incident in particular serves as an example. Realizing that Dr. Wyatt's medical bag was at home, Dr. Jamison had a premonition and looked through its contents, finding in the bottom of the bag; hidden in its recesses what she feared: a syringe and a vial of antipsychotic medication. She was angered that he believed this was necessary. The last thing he intended was to hurt her and his reaction to her distress was heartfelt and painful. It was a difficult moment for him. "Medicine is imperfect." Wyatt tells her, quietly. "I am imperfect."..."You are imperfect."..."Love is imperfect." His patience, kindness and wisdom in the way he dealt with her erratic moods seem boundless and, in time, she changed; she learned to trust him.

Nothing Was the Same has distinctive qualities that emerge from a talented writer who has the soul of a poet and the knowledge of an internationally esteemed psychiatrist. Dr. Jamison writes about her grief with the clear-thinking mind of a physician and the lyrical and sensitive nature of an artist's sensibilities, combining her love story with her intimate understanding, both private and professional, of the nature of grief. This grief, she relates, plunged her into a dangerous darkness. Grief "...has its own territory." "...a minute of sweetness and belief, and then the blackness comes again....this illness will always bring me to my knees. I accumulate sorrow and grief inside, which only wait until the next time to go out again, to remind me how always tides go out once in."

Discussing the sometimes difficult-to-distinguish differences between the closely allied emotions of depression and grief, she writes that their emotions overlap, and are related like cousins, yet they are distinct. "...grief," she writes, "compelled solitude. Time alone in grief proved restorative. Time alone when depressed was dangerous. The thoughts I had of death after Richard's death were necessary and proportionate. They were of his death, not my own. When depressed, however, it was my own death I thought about and desired. It was my own death I sought out. In grief, death occasions the pain. In depression, death is the solution to the pain."

Nothing was the Same is intense because it is personal and honest; Dr. Jamison reveals her inner life without restraint. It grabbed my attention and held my interest from first page to last. Although about grief and depression, I did not find it depressing. Rather, it shares a magnificent love story, a eulogy to the sacred experience of grief and depression. We are made to realize we can grow and learn from these challenging emotions; they are necessary. It inspired in me waves of empathy, admiration, and affection for this sensitive author.

by Duffie Bart
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women