I happened to run into Haddock and family today on my way to the library, and he recommended this book, and the library happened to have it, and I found myself reading it cover to cover in one sitting. Actually, I started reading it when I was walking back from the library, so it wasn’t technically “one sitting.”
At any rate, it’s Joan Didion’s book about the death of her husband, which occurred only days after her daughter was hospitalized with a serious infection in 2003. She writes about the experience of the first year after the death, from the profound sense of disconnection to the random triggers which send her off on complex pathways of memory. At the same time she’s coping with John’s death, she’s also dealing with her hospitalized daughter.
Whom, it turns out, died while the book was in proofs, but Didion decided not to edit the book to reflect this, apparently, feeling that the story had been told. To lose your husband and your child in the course of 18 months must be incredibly devastating, and it made the section of the book where she talks about the weirdness of the potential for your child predeceasing you all the more haunting and prescient.
This book is about death and the experience of death, but it’s also about life, and the small bits and pieces of Didion’s life which come together into a larger whole. It also read, to some extent, like a letter to her husband, talking about the struggles they endured and their ability to commit to each despite these problems. I think it takes a fair amount of balls to write a memoir this honest so quickly after such a huge event, but I think that’s Didion’s way. She had to write about it to process it, and it was interesting to be taken along for the experience.
Demographics:
The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion. Published 2005, 227 pages. Memoir.
