A DIALOGUE ON LOVE
By Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Beacon, 220 pages, $25
NIGHT FALLS FAST:
Understanding Suicide
By Kay Redfield Jamison
Knopf, 432 pages, $26
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but one might counter that the overexamined life sometimes slides into indulgence. In the post-self-help and often-solipsistic 1990s, there have been startling public disclosures about subjects formerly considered taboo. The contemporary personal memoir, sometimes guilty of navel gazing, has challenged the turf of its more traditional precursor, most notably by not limiting itself to a sanitized end-of-life meditation and by focusing on such material as family deceptions, alcoholism, incest, eating disorders, sexual addiction, drug abuse and mental illness.
In “A Dialogue on Love,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, nationally known queer theorist and critic, and a professor of English at City University of New York Graduate Center, has turned her critical eye from literary/theoretical concerns to a recent period in her own life when she sought therapy for depression after treatment for her first bout of breast cancer. As we discover, Sedgwick was no stranger to depression or therapy:
“My history as a patient is like my history as a smoker: I tried it a lot of times years ago, but never learned to inhale. All that depression in my teens and twenties means that over the years I’ve started a lot of therapy. . . . I’d go to these women (women, of course: I was a woman and who else would understand) . . . and within three or four sessions at most, a particular impasse would have gotten wedged so firmly between us we could neither of us move.”
So Sedgwick chose a male therapist named Shannon Van Wey and decided:
“If I can fit the pieces of this self back together at all, I don’t want them to be the way they were. Not because I thought I could be better defended (against depression), either; what I wanted was to be realer.”
What follows is a highly textured reinvention of their sessions: ruminations in lyric prose often aerated mid-sentence by original haikus, as well as excerpts from Van Wey’s (private?) therapist notes. One can’t help but be reminded, in this odd reversal, of Diane Middlebrook’s controversial use of Anne Sexton’s therapy tapes in her Sexton biography, nor can one ignore the openly acknowledged transference taking place.
Admittedly, a trained academic’s carefully shaped construction of her own therapy sessions, driven by a critic’s awareness of texts and language, and her selection of notes by Van Wey, is sure to be eyebrow-raising for the wary reader. The very premise — the purported evolution of intimacy between therapist and client in what is normally a closed-door relationship — smacks of voyeurism, not unlike having the documentary filmmaker recording during intimate family moments.
And yet surprisingly, “A Dialogue on Love” often rises above its own indulgences, partly because of Sedgwick’s refusal to locate her depression in the form of blame in any one place, as well as the near-the-bone poignancy of unexpected vulnerability, even as contained in the shapely form of haiku:
“What I fear now is to have long to thirst anymore in the stony desert of that self”
As she and Van Wey delve together into childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, intriguing clues about human need emerge: Sedgwick’s awkward shyness and discomfort within the family, her sexual fantasies and masturbatory impulses, her sense of “physical difference” and her mother’s outwardly declared lesbian proclivities even though her parents remain married. At the forefront looms this large, distant, and mysterious figure of Sedgwick’s mother, who is oblivious to her daughter’s overwhelming adoration of her, and the loneliness that led her child to go off by herself to masturbate. The signifiers leap and stride each time Sedgwick’s mother takes the stage, in a fascinating kaleidoscope of complexities that are never really pursued sufficiently. Likewise, Sedgwick’s own analysis of her personal affinity for gay men and the allure of queerness, as interrogated by Van Wey, never really transcends the outsider-status position of “difference” she has staked out, veering awkwardly at times into appropriation. Her own presumably happy marriage of many years remains a footnote, perhaps out of deference to her spouse, her heterosexual life reduced humorously to “vanilla sex.”
Larger ontological questions float above the purely personal, and the mystery of the individual human condition is never flattened by or reduced to a particular event or cause, nor is Sedgwick’s desperate search for love and happiness cordoned off neatly into easy clinical categories. In fact, it is her language that resonates and keeps the pages turning, the simple beauty of words carefully chosen, and the effects of the haiku. Her obsession with death (understandable after her struggles with cancer) verges on excitement but is distilled in a newfound interest in a Buddhism represented in oblique references to “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.” It is no surprise that the multilayered simplicities of Buddhism would appeal to Sedgwick, who offers up one of her most poignant observations toward the end in this haiku about moral injunctions: the only one that matters is this: If you can be happy, you should
But much is left unresolved or incomplete by the end, and the book has an oddly vignette-like feel, utterly absorbing and absorbed in all its possibilities.
Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Night Falls Fast” is a straightforward, fast-paced, poignant exploration of suicide, beginning with an acknowledgment of the author’s own suicide attempt, prompted by her struggles with manic-depression, at 28. Jamison is also the author of “An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness.” Undoubtedly it is her personal experience with the “black night” (manic-depression), coupled with her clinical research and work as a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, that led her to this book, which combines highly readable research and analysis with personal testimony and sympathetic, very human essays about individuals whose battles with manic-depression led to successful suicides.
The book begins with a prologue describing the suicide of a close friend years before. The two had made a “blood oath” to persuade each other, if necessary, not to go through with suicide. After her friend’s death, Jamison writes:
“Although shaken by Jack’s suicide, I was not surprised by it. Nor was I surprised that he had not called me. I, after all, had been dangerously suicidal myself on several occasions since our . . . compact and certainly had not called him. Nor had I even thought of calling. Suicide is not beholden to an evening’s promises, nor does it always hearken to plans drawn up in lucid moments and banked in good intentions.”
This sets the tone for a book that is, in equal parts, an example of sympathetic insights and reader-friendly research.
The book is divided into four sections, offering, among many things, a historical overview (primarily Judeo-Christian European), an examination of the hows and whys of suicide, a look at the link with genetics, and an exploration of treatment and prevention.
Startling statistics show that 30,000 Americans commit suicide each year, that nearly one-third of them have visited a doctor in the week before they die, and that those suffering not only from manic-depression but depression, panic attacks and anxiety disorder are at higher risk for suicide.
Jamison, who has done a book related to the artistic temperament and manic-depression, intersperses heart-breaking excerpts about mental illness and the attraction to suicide from works by a number of well-known writers, including poets Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alfred Lord Tennyson (with his self-described “black blood”), William Cowper, John Berryman and Dylan Thomas, as well as such prose writers as Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf, many of whom suffered from mental illnesses and/or related troubles like alcoholism and whose own lives ended in suicide. The list of writers so burdened with despair is surely startling when seen in toto, but their presence here offers alternate vocabulary for the indescribable and supports Jamison’s claim that suicide is more common in highly creative or successful writers, artists, scientists and business people than in the general population. In fact, she points out that another psychiatrist has argued that “language and psychosis have a common evolutionary origin and that schizophrenia (for example) may be the price that Homo sapiens pays for having language.”
Jamison compassionately portrays the struggles of “ordinary” people and writes about — and at times directly to — the family members and friends affected by their suicides. Understanding the power of anecdote, she weaves in a number of individual stories that show the infinite range of reasons and methods but also begin to outline a presuicide pattern, more easily recognized than we may realize. She includes checklists for identifying potential problems, but her in-depth look at underlying complexities is what really gives the book its drive.
In the chapter “What Matters It, If Rope or Garter,” she details numerous methods of suicide (notably, women choose less-violent, less-certain means), then explains:
“These singular methods of suicide are far from being just a sideshow of freakish death; they give testament instead to the desperation and determination of the suicidal mind. Their very bizarreness somehow makes the act more real. They evoke horror, certainly, but they also give us a glimpse into otherwise unimaginable misery and madness.”
It is this “unimaginable misery” that Jamison so even-handedly summons, drawing in her readers. The book’s subtitle, “Understanding Suicide,” makes clear Jamison’s mission, for understanding and awareness precede prevention. A three-page appendix of resources for information about suicide, mental illness, and alcohol and drug abuse, and nearly 100 pages of notes at the book’s end would make excellent starting points for one’s own follow-up research.
