Christopher Lightfoot Walker Reading Series

Kay Redfield Jamison: Fires in the Dark

In conversation with Atul Gawande

Sep 22, 2023

Pulitzer Prize finalist Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire) presents a major new work of nonfiction — Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind — in conversation with #1 New York Times bestselling author, surgeon, and global public-health advocate Atul Gawande (Being Mortal). At once an expertly crafted cultural history and a starkly personal account of the age-old quest for relief from psychological pain, Fires in the Dark is a timely and timeless meditation on the transformative power of psychotherapy. Deftly moving between the trauma of 20th-century battlefields to her own struggles with bipolar disorder to our shifting conceptions of grief and clinical depression, Jamison presents a profoundly moving and nuanced portrait of how a century of clinical, spiritual, and aesthetic interventions have changed the way we understand our psyches. In a reading and conversation that could only happen at 92NY, hear these two renowned writers and public-health experts on the art and the mysteries of healing the mind.

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