After Him

By Cathleen Medwick
Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison
Nothing Was the Same
By Kay Redfield Jamison
224 pages; Knopf

In her 1995 memoir, An Unquiet Mind, Johns Hopkins professor Kay Redfield Jamison startled and enlightened the psychiatric community (not to mention the wider world) with the disclosure of her own manic-depressive illness. Now Jamison returns with Nothing Was the Same, the elegiac and emotionally precise story of life with and without her late husband, scientist Richard Wyatt. His romantic intelligence, whether focused on a meteor shower or on his wife's mercurial temperament, had an "elegant inventiveness" that kept her demons at bay. Wyatt's death from cancer taught Jamison the crucial difference between depression and grief: "My heart broke, but it beat."

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From the October 2009 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine