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In 1995 a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, co-author of the standard medical textbook on manic-depressive illness, published a memoir saying that she had the illness herself. Kay Redfield Jamison, born in 1946, had her first episode of mania as a high-school student, was diagnosed three months into her first job as a professor at UCLA, and once tried to kill herself with an overdose of lithium, the drug she had repeatedly stopped taking. An Unquiet Mind made her name outside medicine. Around it she has written on suicide, on creativity and mood, on grief, and a biography of the poet Robert Lowell that was a Pulitzer finalist. This guide covers her eight key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 key books · 1990–2023 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Kay Redfield Jamison has written eight key books, from the textbook Manic-Depressive Illness (1990) to Fires in the Dark (2023). The best known is An Unquiet Mind (1995), her memoir of bipolar disorder; the others include Touched with Fire (1993), Night Falls Fast (1999) and Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire (2017), a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Start with An Unquiet Mind, then follow her subject: creativity, suicide, grief or Lowell.
Where to Start with Kay Redfield Jamison
If you want her defining book
→ An Unquiet Mind (1995) — the memoir of her own bipolar disorder.
If you want the link between mood and creativity
→ Touched with Fire (1993) — poets, painters and composers with manic-depressive illness.
If you want to understand suicide
→ Night Falls Fast (1999) — science, history and prevention in one book.
If you want her most personal book after the memoir
→ Nothing Was the Same (2009) — love, illness and grief.
8 Kay Redfield Jamison Books, in Order
Manic-Depressive Illness
A comprehensive medical textbook on the illness now usually called bipolar disorder, written with the psychiatrist Frederick K. Goodwin and published by Oxford University Press. A review in the New England Journal of Medicine called it “thorough and most readable”. A much expanded second edition, subtitled Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, followed in 2007.
Touched with Fire
Jamison argues that there is a significant association between the artistic temperament and manic-depressive illness, drawing on the lives of Robert Schumann, Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, John Berryman and Hart Crane, with an extended study of Lord Byron. The book gave its title to Touched with Fire (2016), Paul Dalio’s film about two poets with bipolar disorder, played by Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby, in which Jamison appears as herself.
An Unquiet Mind
Her own life with bipolar disorder, from a military-town childhood and a first hypomanic episode in high school to her diagnosis while a young professor at UCLA. She describes stopping lithium again and again, a suicide attempt, the effect of the illness on her marriages, and the decision to make her condition known at Johns Hopkins. Published by Knopf in September 1995; on NPR in 2009 Melody Moezzi called it “the most brilliant and brutally honest book I’ve ever read about bipolar disorder”.
Night Falls Fast
A study of suicide as an often preventable medical and social problem, concentrating on people under 40. Jamison covers its links with depression and manic-depressive illness, its biology, family patterns and history, with portraits of people who died by suicide, among them the explorer Meriwether Lewis. Andrew Solomon reviewed it for The New York Times; the book ends with a line from the poet Douglas Dunn: “Look to the living, love them, and hold on.”
Exuberance
The other side of her subject: high spirits as a temperament, and what they do for leaders, scientists and teachers. She looks at Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, at children’s writers such as A. A. Milne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Kenneth Grahame, at teachers such as Humphry Davy and Richard Feynman, and interviews scientists including James Watson.
Nothing Was the Same
A memoir of her marriage to Richard Wyatt, chief of neuropsychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health, whom she married in 1994. His Hodgkin’s disease returned after some twenty years in remission, and he died of cancer in 2002. The book follows their relationship, his illness and treatment, his death, and her grief and slow recovery.
Robert Lowell
A psychological study of the poet Robert Lowell and the manic-depressive illness behind his repeated breakdowns, written with unusual access to his medical records. Rather than a conventional biography, it asks how his illness and his discipline shaped the poems. It was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, cited as “a superb examination of the life, work and struggles of Robert Lowell”.
Fires in the Dark
A history of how people have eased mental suffering: psychotherapy and medicine, but also ritual, art, nature, religion, love and music. Among her examples are the physician William Osler, whose son Revere was killed at Passchendaele in 1917, Walt Whitman as a Civil War nurse, and Paul Robeson. Jamison discussed it with Atul Gawande at 92NY in September 2023.
In What Order to Read Kay Redfield Jamison
None of her books depends on another, so read by subject. Publication order does show a pattern: the clinical and historical studies of the early 1990s, the turn to her own life in 1995, then books that widen out from mania to suicide, exuberance, grief and healing.
An Unquiet Mind explains why she writes about the rest, so it is the natural first book. The 1990 textbook is a medical reference for clinicians and researchers rather than a book for general readers; most readers can skip it.
A reading path
1. An Unquiet Mind (1995)
2. Touched with Fire (1993)
3. Night Falls Fast (1999)
4. Nothing Was the Same (2009)
5. Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire (2017)
Everything Else Kay Redfield Jamison Published
Beyond the 8 key books: 2 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Textbooks
2
2 books · 1980–2007
- 1980Abnormal Psychology: Experiences, Origins, and Interventionsa university textbook, second edition 1986
- 2007Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depressionthe much expanded second edition of the 1990 text
The years · 1946–2023
Quick facts about Kay Redfield Jamison
- Known for
- Writing about manic-depressive illness both as one of its leading researchers and as someone who has lived with it since adolescence
- 1946
- Born into a US Air Force family
- 1975
- PhD in clinical psychology, UCLA
- 1995
- An Unquiet Mind
- 2001
- MacArthur Fellowship
- Born
- 22 June 1946; her father was an Air Force officer, and the family moved between Florida, Puerto Rico, California, Tokyo and Washington
- Education
- UCLA (BA, MA, PhD 1975); also studied zoology and neurophysiology at the University of St Andrews
- Positions
- Dalio Professor in Mood Disorders and professor of psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; honorary professor of English, St Andrews
- Honours
- MacArthur Fellowship (2001), Lewis Thomas Prize, Sarnat Prize; Pulitzer finalist (2018)
- Marriages
- Richard Wyatt, 1994 until his death in 2002; the cardiologist Thomas Traill, 2010
- Family
- Her niece is the essayist Leslie Jamison
The red mark is 1995: An Unquiet Mind, the memoir in which she disclosed her own bipolar disorder.
How Kay Redfield Jamison Writes: The Clinician Inside the Case
Jamison writes from two positions at once. She is a clinical psychologist who co-wrote the standard textbook on manic-depressive illness, and she has the illness. Her general books keep the researcher’s apparatus — statistics, diagnostic criteria, notes — while the memoirs describe mania and depression from inside, in the first person.
Much of her work proceeds through lives rather than through theory. Touched with Fire builds its argument from the family histories of poets, painters and composers; Night Falls Fast sets case portraits beside the figures; Robert Lowell reads one poet’s whole life, with his medical records, as a single long case.
Her sources are as often literary as medical. She quotes poets throughout, ends Night Falls Fast on a line by Douglas Dunn, and in Fires in the Dark turns to Whitman and Osler to show how people have healed one another. She is also an honorary professor of English at St Andrews.
Watch
Kay Redfield Jamison and Atul Gawande on Fires in the Dark
Jamison talks with the surgeon and writer Atul Gawande at 92NY’s Christopher Lightfoot Walker Reading Series in September 2023 about Fires in the Dark and how people have healed the mind.
Frequently asked questions about Kay Redfield Jamison’s books
How many books has Kay Redfield Jamison written?
Eight key books, listed on this page, from Manic-Depressive Illness (1990) to Fires in the Dark (2023). She also co-wrote the textbook Abnormal Psychology (1980), and Manic-Depressive Illness appeared in a much expanded second edition in 2007.
What are Kay Redfield Jamison’s books in order?
Manic-Depressive Illness (1990, with Frederick K. Goodwin), Touched with Fire (1993), An Unquiet Mind (1995), Night Falls Fast (1999), Exuberance (2004), Nothing Was the Same (2009), Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire (2017) and Fires in the Dark (2023).
Where should I start with Kay Redfield Jamison?
An Unquiet Mind (1995), her memoir of bipolar disorder. It explains what drives the rest of her work; from there, choose by subject: creativity (Touched with Fire), suicide (Night Falls Fast) or grief (Nothing Was the Same).
What is Kay Redfield Jamison’s most famous book?
An Unquiet Mind (1995), in which she described her own manic-depressive illness while a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. Among clinicians, the textbook Manic-Depressive Illness is equally well known.
Does Kay Redfield Jamison have bipolar disorder?
Yes. Her first episode came in high school, and she was diagnosed three months into her first job as a professor at UCLA. She has written about it openly since An Unquiet Mind in 1995.
Is Touched with Fire a film?
Yes. Paul Dalio’s film Touched with Fire, released in 2016, takes its title from her 1993 book, which features in the story. Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby play two poets with bipolar disorder, and Jamison appears as herself.
Did Kay Redfield Jamison win a Pulitzer Prize?
No, but she was a finalist: Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001.
Is Kay Redfield Jamison related to Leslie Jamison?
Yes. The essayist Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering, is her niece.
Is Kay Redfield Jamison still alive?
Yes. She was born on 22 June 1946 and is the Dalio Professor in Mood Disorders at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her most recent book, Fires in the Dark, appeared in 2023.
Footnotes
- Kay Redfield Jamison — Wikipedia
- An Unquiet Mind — Wikipedia
- Kay Redfield Jamison, finalist in Biography — The Pulitzer Prizes
- Review of Night Falls Fast — Andrew Solomon, The New York Times, 1999
- A Means to Healing the Living — Johns Hopkins Medicine, 2023
- Movie Chronicles Life with Bipolar Disorder — Johns Hopkins Medicine
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons.”
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind (1995)
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