Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love

(Paperback)

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You will find all of life in this Deborah Levy
After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. Then, too, the cultural and political moment seemed to collude with her condition: everywhere people were dislocated and angry.

In this electrifying and brave examination of an ordinary enough death and its aftermath, Everyday Madness uses all Lisa Appignanesis evocative and analytic powers to scrutinize her own and our societys experience of grieving. With searing honesty, lashed by humour, she navigates us onto the terrain of childhood, the way it forms our feelings of love and hate, and steers us towards a less tumultuous version of the everyday.

Reviews

Appignanesi luminously conveys the wayward emotions that make bereavement a language that is hard to understand, yet speaks to us every day when we experience a great loss. You will find all of life in this rewarding, scholarly and entertaining conversation about freedom, Freud, fury, enduring love, and how mythic and modern families haunt each other Deborah Levy

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

A ragged, stop-start quality, often feeling like a conversation, at times an argument, with the reader, and is all the more engaging for it Guardian

An investigation of a state that floats somewhere between diagnosed mental illness and daily life; she is her surveys principal case, but shes interested, too, in the historical moment whose anger and loss, she insists, can be understood as sharing a set of emotions with her own Observer

It is anger of the everyday sort that is currently being politicised. Feminists are fighting back against the way womens anger is typically caricatured and delegitimised, and celebrating the power of collective female anger as a way of flexing socially progressive muscle a brave and compelling book New Statesman

Everyday Madness is supple, powerful and remarkably solipsistic; Appignanesi meditates with great wisdom and fierce honesty on "the puzzle that the self perennially is" in a memoir that begins in opaqueness and ends in clarity' TLS

Author Bio

Lisa Appignanesi has been a university lecturer in European Studies and was Deputy Director of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her works of non-fiction include Freud's Women' (with John Forrester), a biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir, and a history of cabaret. She has edited The Rushdie File' and a number of books on contemporary culture, as well as producing various films for television. Lisa Appignanesi lives in London with her two children.