The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Jul. 31st, 2006 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jawnbcI am gutted.
The Year of Magical Thinking tells how celebrated writer Joan Didion copes with the death of her husband (suddenly, at home, at the dinner table), while their only daughter lies in intensive care at a nearby hospital. Over the course of 12 months--though granted, not using a rigid chronological structure--we learn of their 40 year marriage, the things that one accumulates in a long-term, happy partnership (memories, possessions, turns of phrase). But what I found so painfully compelling is how Didion tries to use the only tools that have never failed her as a writer: research.
Thus, Magical Thinkin is about one woman's story of grief. But it's also an examination of how ideas about grief and mourning have changed over time. It's about how a person whose life is fairly solidly structured around facts and knoweldge copes when that logic of distinction fails her. And, eventually, her daughter (Quintana Roo Dunne Michaels died a few months before the book was published. I cannot imagine bearing the loss of you life partner and your only child in a space of 18 months.
But I couldn't put it down. Horribly brilliant writing.
The Year of Magical Thinking tells how celebrated writer Joan Didion copes with the death of her husband (suddenly, at home, at the dinner table), while their only daughter lies in intensive care at a nearby hospital. Over the course of 12 months--though granted, not using a rigid chronological structure--we learn of their 40 year marriage, the things that one accumulates in a long-term, happy partnership (memories, possessions, turns of phrase). But what I found so painfully compelling is how Didion tries to use the only tools that have never failed her as a writer: research.
Thus, Magical Thinkin is about one woman's story of grief. But it's also an examination of how ideas about grief and mourning have changed over time. It's about how a person whose life is fairly solidly structured around facts and knoweldge copes when that logic of distinction fails her. And, eventually, her daughter (Quintana Roo Dunne Michaels died a few months before the book was published. I cannot imagine bearing the loss of you life partner and your only child in a space of 18 months.
But I couldn't put it down. Horribly brilliant writing.
