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

       PRELUDE

      THIS 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 isn’t 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. It’s 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 that’s 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.