Everyday Madness
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 Appignanesi’s evocative and analytic powers to scrutinize her own and our society’s 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.
Born in Poland in 1946, Lisa Appignanesi grew up in Montreal from the age of six. Since moving to Britain in her twenties she has been central to British cultural life: a former President of English PEN and former Chair of the Trustees of the Freud Museum in London, she is currently the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She has published extensively, both fiction and non-fiction, including the novel MEMORY AND DESIRE and the non-fiction books MAD, BAD, AND SAD and ALL ABOUT LOVE.