Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir - Softcover

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year

"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

"Elegiac and emotionally precise."
--O, The Oprah Magazine

"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

"A soul-baring love letter."
--Kirkus Reviews

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

"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."
--Booklist (starred review)