In this book, Jamison deals with bipolar disorder (or manic-depression is its other name). She looks at it from the perspective of a doctor and a patient. Jamison, a clinical psychologist, is one of the experts on this awful mental illness, as well as someone who has it. What's interesting is that she brings a human face to the table as she describes her childhood and adulthood with bipolar disorder as her constant companion. There is no self-pity in this memoir, and yet, Jamison writes about herself with compassion. It is deeply honest without being what I consider "raw" - an airing of very dirty laundry in an effort to shock and choke the reader. Despite its serious subject matter and the possibility of the book coming off as an exercise in total darkness, it is actually hopeful without ever denying the "black moods," and the reality of what it means to be in deep despair, nothingness, and mania. (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, New York: Vintage, 1996).
This short exploration of life lived when faced with death serves as the meditation on life and death. You can read it quickly, in one sitting, or you can slowly explore Sacks' reflections. Oliver Sacks died on August 30, 2015 at the age of 82. In the last few months of his life, he wrote a few short essays, which are contained in this book. It's not a morbid book. How does one deal with death indeed? Sacks does not mince words, and this does not come as a surprise. He has always written with honesty, bringing difficult neurological and neuropsychiatric subjects to life for the "common" reader, for those of us who are not doctors. All of his life, his main goal was to bring out the face of the human being that suffers and to continuously humanize the patients he has dealt with. In Gratitude, he explores his Jewish roots and early rejection of them, which lasted most of his life, until he experiences a return to Israel. He also explores his homosexuality, his mother's utter rejection of him, and a choice to live a celibate life. It is only later that Sacks encounters a man, who is to become his partner. It's a life well lived, we might say. Or to use that cliche, a life lived to the fullest. (Gratitude, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016).
I may be a somewhat biased reviewer of this book, because it figures prominently into my dissertation. But I still have to recommend it! Duras has had a long writing and film making career, and she has a prominent place in the French literature and film. The Lover is a short novel about an adolescent French girl's relationship with an older Chinese man. It takes place during the last days of France's colonial empire in Vietnam. It is speculated that this novel is really Duras' memoir. But I don't find this to be either helpful or a hindrance to the reading experience. A reader should be able to enjoy Duras' beautiful exploration of the erotic relation, be it true or not. The novel is deeply honest about our erotic relationships and experiences. And yet, it is not pornography. Rather, it is about an elevation of human erotic experience, despite the fact that it deals with a controversial subject. It's about seeing the face and not only the body of another human being and recognizing a nudity of interiority, rather then the physical nudity. It delineates between nudity and nakedness, and most of all, it explores the meaning of love. (The Lover, New York: Random House, 1985).
If you have read The Liars' Club or Lit, you know that athletic, sacred, and profane prose that Karr is famous for. She is a spiritual badass. She has only written memoirs, but they are literature, they are novels, they are poetry, they are comedy and tragedy. In The Art of Memoir, Karr looks at the craft of writing itself. She infuses it with autobiography (in a similar vein as Stephen King does in On Writing). The result is a portrait of a woman as a writer, whose life is inextricably connected to her writing. What Karr affirms, and what most writers will say, is that writing life is inevitably connected to the life itself. Whether she explores her struggle with alcohol, or her perhaps reluctant and mischievous and rebelious conversion to Catholicism, or her totally nutty family, Karr brings out the "rules" of writing to the writers new and old. As it is to be expected from a Karr work, she is relentlessly honest and authentic about herself and others. (New York: Harper Collins, 2015).
C. E. Morgan has just come out with a new novel, titled The Sport of Kings, and I am very much looking forward to reading it. But before I am able to comment on her new novel, I highly recommend her debut work, All the Living. She wrote this book in a very short time, while she was working on her Master's degree at the Harvard Divinity School. It is a beautiful book; and almost an instant classic, precisely because it is completely free of any ideology. It is a novel about people (imagine that!) and their struggle to live authentic and meaningful lives. It focuses on a young woman, Aloma, who moves to a farm that is inherited by her lover. She deeply struggles with the loneliness of a farm life, and she befriends a young preacher in town. Of course, things become complicated: her relationship with her lover, Orren, grows distant, while her relation to the preacher grows more and more erotic as the days go by. But this is not just some "Madam Bovary," or "Lady Chatterley" experience. Far from it! The eros in this novel is subtle, implied, and far more complex than a simple corporeal relation. The novel, despite how short it is, has Biblical overtones, and it is a deeply American work. In the similar vein to Willa Cather, Morgan explores the earth landscape as well as the landscapes of human mind and body. (All the Living, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
