Lisa Appignanesi - Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love

Contents

Everyday Madness offers a brilliant theory and definition of a modern malady, but what makes it so enticing is that its also a case study in the condition it describes. In other words, in identifying a previously undescribed territory, Lisa Appignanesi has wonderfully invented a previously unwritten form

Adam Thirlwell

Keen-eyed, unflinching in her honesty, Lisa Appignanesi carries us down into the depths through an inner landscape of unappeasable turmoil, as she moves towards knowledge of love and the serenity it brings. With piercing insight and many moments of intense poignancy, she illuminates the complexity and costs of a remarkable and passionate journey

Marina Warner

Wonderful, moving, extraordinary. It is sui generis. I feel enormously privileged to have read it twice. Its structure is remarkable an enacting of the last two years. Bravo, bravo

Edmund de Waal

Thoughtful, challenging, illuminating, truthful and moving. We all bear losses. Lisa Appignanesi breaks the isolation and helps us endure them

Susie Orbach

By deftly moving between the personal and the public, between childhood and adulthood, between the immediacy of feeling and the distance of reflection, Lisa Appignanesi constructs an anatomy of grief and its frequent but discomfiting attendant: rage. The private, the political, and the philosophical merge in a single story of a woman navigating the jolts, terrors, fury, and confusion that arrive after the death of her spouse

Siri Hustvedt

Some thinkers use the word trauma to characterize such states, but since mine is an experience shared by everyone who has suffered loss, I prefer to limit this overused diagnostic term to more narrow and more extreme conditions.

4th Estate

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First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

This 4th Estate paperback edition 2019

Copyright Lisa Appignanesi 2018

Cover photography: Shutterstock

The right of Lisa Appignanesi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008300333

Ebook Edition 2019 ISBN: 9780008300319

Version: 2019-08-02

For John

and our first grandson,

Manny

Without the thought of death, it is impossible to make out anything in a human being. Its mystery hangs over everything.

SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH

The death of a loved one is actually also the death of a private, whole, personal and unique culture, with its own special language and its own secret, and it will never be again, nor will there be another like it.

DAVID GROSSMAN

T HIS IS A BOOK about the kinds of states that float somewhere between diagnosed madness and daily life. They are ordinary enough states and yet they are extraordinary. Without toppling us over into the register of specified mental illness, they can nonetheless hover close and scary. They are part of what make us individuals and not statistics, subjects for narrative, rather than objects for the sorts of studies that feed drug trials, corporations, advertising campaigns or state records. Humans are ample, often suffering beings. The machine model of cognition, of information processing, just isnt adequate to our complexity.

I am the principal case in what follows, though really only a woman whose husband has recently died. His death launches me on a journey. Its not one that has an identifiable destination. Perhaps because of that the political and social atmosphere of the moment hover very close.

I have tried in the middle section of the book to investigate the ways in which our historical moment and the wider world could be understood as sharing a set of emotions with my own grieving state. Anger and loss are political, not simply personal feelings. They bleed into us collectively: the media and the social networks play their part. I have a hunch that the time we spend as and with disembodied beings feeds into these dark feelings, too.

Sometimes they can be assuaged or at least counterbalanced by hope. Luckily thats where I landed in the final part of this book.

I hope my children will forgive my exposure. I have tried to be circumspect. Their mother is a reliable enough person, but when it comes to writing, the writer steps in.

What Im talking about now is a very ancient part of human awareness. It may even be what defines the human although it [was] largely forgotten in the second half of the twentieth century. The dead are not abandoned. They are kept near physically. They are a presence. What you think youre looking at on that long road to the past is actually beside you where you stand.

JOHN BERGER

T HE SMALL TRANSLUCENT bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.

I couldnt bring myself to move it or use it.

When I finally picked it up, it was caked and slightly clammy to the touch, like perspiring, not quite healthy skin. I put my glasses on to make out the indistinct print on the front of the curve. For the first time I could see that, next to the stylized palm tree, vanishing letters spelled out Memory of Senses.

I put the bottle back on the shelf. Quickly.

Though I had rid the house of bagsful of clothes, unopened packs of tobacco, wires that belonged to defunct machines, and some of the other random leavings of life, I somehow couldnt chuck that tiny bottle.

Superstition.

We all know the dead inhabit select objects. Even when we might also believe that theyve gone to meet their maker or joined the elements in a field or river, or their everlasting souls have travelled up to Heaven to be judged by a supreme court at which angels bear witness to their deeds, good and bad, and eleven months of purgatory await.

Superstition: from the Latin over + stand. A presence stands over us, one whom we fear or who might just bring us luck. Or perhaps, as in surveillance, that presence compounds security and fear. Cicero, that hoary old philosopher who, according to one of my school teachers, had intoned something about diseases of the mind being more common and more pernicious than those of the body, had considered the word to be a derivation of