The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Date Read: Fall 2007; Revisited: Regularly. How Strongly I Recommend It: 8/10
Didion is a great writer and this is a personal memoir about grief and losing her husband. It’s a book where timing is important. You have to be open and ready to enter into this kind of story and have it connect with you. It is an empathy builder and really helped me face loss in my own life. I return to portions of this book often – it’s some of the most quotable writing on grief. It’s one of those books where you read and say, yup. Thank you for naming that.
I tried listening to the audio book last year and found that I much preferred the paper version. It engaged more of my senses and allowed me to slow down and savor certain parts.
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we…do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind…Nor can we know ahead of the fact…the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion, pg 188-189
“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion, pg. 26-27
“I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.”
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion, pg. 52
“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.”
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion, pg. 75
Notice the front cover of the book – it spells her husbands first name.
