Once I posted my reading list for the Spring Reading Thing Challenge I got started almost right away on The Year of Magical Thinkingby Joan Didion.
I don’t really know what I expected to get out of reading this book. I initially read about The Year of Magical Thinking on another blog and thought that it may be an interesting read. This is the non-fiction account of the year following the sudden death of the authors husband John. In the beginning of the book, Didion describes the pure chaos surrounding her while paramedics worked on her husband, who suffered a heart attack. All the while, Didion’s adult daughter lay in a hospital bed with a life-threatening case of pneumonia and septic shock.
Being a writer herself, Didion turned to literature to help her understand her own grief. From poems, self-help books and even Emily Post’s 1922 book of etiquette (the chapter on funerals) Didion found that information on grief was spare.
The author writes from the heart and at times you can really feel for her. She writes that while cleaning out her husband’s closet a few months after his death, she couldn’t give away his shoes. “I stood there a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.” She goes on to say “On most surface levels I seemed rational. To the average observer I would have appeared to fully understand that death was irreversible.”
In the end I liked the book, but didn’t love it. I don’t think it was really the book itself that I didn’t like, but the fact that for the most part I am not a huge fan of non-fiction. I do though appreciate how in the end she sums up grief this way “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”
- Stephanie
