The Year of Magical Thinking (original 2005; edition 2007)

Sorry I couldn't warm to this. Although it's about a terrible tragedy, the writing is cold and she name drops annoyingly and ultimately sounds like an overpriviledged person you can't sympathise with, as much as you want to. ( )

I picked up this book on a friend's recommendation hoping to find some sort of inspirational story about how we can cope with sudden death and tragedy. As a person who suffers from considerable anxiety and a potent fear of my and my loved ones' deaths, I thought this book would be helpful, would give me strength and encouragement...
Not so. It's not a bad book. It's very classic Joan Didion--serious, unflinching, dark. But it was too sad for me, too too sad. She presents her experience dealing with her husband' sudden death and her daughter's life threatening illness as horrible and lonely and frightening as you imagine it would be. When the story ends, she is continuing on, but she is still shattered, sad and irreversibly changed.
I'm not saying I want her to lie...it's just I wish I hadn't read it. I made myself skim the whole book, even after I knew how depressing it was. But, I didn't need to go there.
It was terribly, terribly sad. And I don't recommend it, unless you have gone through the same thing and you're looking to find a sort of recognition of your own misery.
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Lent: Moving (but not sentimental) recollection of the year following J.G. Dunne's death by his wife; candid look at mourning, grief, love, and devotion

This is the second book my girlfriend has recommended to me about people whose spouses die. So...

There's a clinical feel about this book. Not accidentally: Didion goes out of her way to cite research on the effects of grief. She analyzes it. You can feel her standing back from it, trying desperately to understand it. It lacks the emotional punch of (the other depressing-ass book my girlfriend convinced me to read) [b:About Alice,|95961|About Alice|Calvin Trillin|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320388384s/95961.jpg|1168959] and it does that on purpose. This is how Joan Didion works, I guess: she tries to dig in and understand. She's "a cool customer," as a hospital worker describes her at the moment of her husband's death. "What," she wonders, "would an uncool customer be allowed to do?"

I told Jo that I connected with About Alice more, emotionally; this seemed more like a description. Someone said here on Goodreads that it was nice to hear a story about a real passionate love affair, and I was surprised; that's not the story I read. It may have been passionate, but that's not in this book. There's not one mention of a passionate moment. Moments of support, absolutely, and of friendship, but never passion. At times I felt like the tragedy here wasn't the loss of love, but the loss of habit.

But habit is life, and what Didion is trying to describe is the loss of her life as she knew it. Jo said it nicely: About Alice is about love, she said; Year of Magical Thinking is about loss.

I call I die first so I don't have to go through this. It sounds like a bummer. ( )

Made me want to die before my wife does.


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