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Lisa Appignanesi discusses her book, Everyday Madness: on Grief, Anger, Loss and Love with Susie Orbach. Its original release was September 2018 and was re-released in paperback a year later.
‘The 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.”
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. The dead of prior generations loomed large and haunting. 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, Appignanesi uses all her evocative and analytic powers to scrutinize her own and our society’s experience of grieving, the effects of loss and the potent, mythical space it occupies in our lives.
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.
This book may be short, but life, death, madness, love, and grandchildren, are all there seen through the eyes of a writer who is ever aware of the historical and current vagaries of woman’s condition.
Everyday Madness: on Grief, Anger, Loss and Love
is available from the Freud Museum Shop.
‘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
Lisa Appignanesi has been a university lecturer in European Studies and was Chair of Trustees of the Freud Museum London. 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.
Susie Orbach is a leading psychoanalyst. Amongst her many books are Bodies and In Therapy. Founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre and the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, Susie has recently received the first ever Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Psychoanalytic Council.
