Scan barcode
A review by louiza_read2live
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
4.0
A memoir of a widow's grief, a mother's agony. How much can a person handle?Joan Didion had to learn the limits of her own strength with the sudden death of her husband only five days after their only daughter had been admitted to the hospital and was placed on life support. Even though their daughter pulled through that first illness, at the time, Didion had to face the irrevocability of her husband's death; if that wasn't enough, their daughter ends up at the UCLA fighting again between life and death not long after her father's funeral service. Some have criticized Didion's writing as too informational and unemotional.
I can understand how one might think that; nevertheless, I disagree. Every person deals with grief, illness, and life's tragedies differently. One might cry quietly, while another one might scream and faint, or another one might try to keep from falling apart by focusing on facts, on research to try to understand and explain the inexplicable. I believe that Joan Didion's reactions do not lack emotion; her emotions are aligned with her life and work as a writer and a journalist. It makes sense that reading, researching, quoting experts in trying to understand life, death, and illness, and what happened to her own life would be the way she would indirectly express these unbearable emotions.
Her writing, styled in sometimes short, definite sentences while at other times breathlessly long, the surprisingly and seemingly irrelevant thoughts in times where the focus should be at the fear for her daughter's life and the pain for her husband's sudden death, as well as the memories that flow from the far past to the days or to the moments before death knocked on her door, all indicate the struggle to cope, to bear the pain, to account for the life that was versus the life that is--to understand the essence of grief and to come to terms with it, with a life before and after the unthinkable strikes and all the moments in between as the mind struggles to comprehend and accept that life changes without warning--irreversibly.
"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends" (Didion).
I can understand how one might think that; nevertheless, I disagree. Every person deals with grief, illness, and life's tragedies differently. One might cry quietly, while another one might scream and faint, or another one might try to keep from falling apart by focusing on facts, on research to try to understand and explain the inexplicable. I believe that Joan Didion's reactions do not lack emotion; her emotions are aligned with her life and work as a writer and a journalist. It makes sense that reading, researching, quoting experts in trying to understand life, death, and illness, and what happened to her own life would be the way she would indirectly express these unbearable emotions.
Her writing, styled in sometimes short, definite sentences while at other times breathlessly long, the surprisingly and seemingly irrelevant thoughts in times where the focus should be at the fear for her daughter's life and the pain for her husband's sudden death, as well as the memories that flow from the far past to the days or to the moments before death knocked on her door, all indicate the struggle to cope, to bear the pain, to account for the life that was versus the life that is--to understand the essence of grief and to come to terms with it, with a life before and after the unthinkable strikes and all the moments in between as the mind struggles to comprehend and accept that life changes without warning--irreversibly.
"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends" (Didion).