Nothing Was the Same — by Kay Redfield Jamison

A memoir of her marriage to Richard Wyatt, which focuses on the final years of his life until he died from metastatic cancer in 2002.

A sad book, yes, but also peculiarly uplifting, in that it points the way to a path out from pain and grief.

It's a beautiful meditation on mortality and loss whose 15-page-long penultimate chapter, entitled "Mourning and Melancholia," is particularly valuable, discussing in detail and from personal experience the difference between grief and depression, from the perspective of an individual whose experience with both and poetic fluidity of language enables her to differentiate between the potentially catastrophic outcome of one and the less life-threatening other.

That chapter should be made available on a stand-alone basis, even offered gratis through the grace of some foundation.

Look inside the book here.

Excerpt from the book here.

A 1999 interview on "The Charlie Rose Show" here.