15. The Year Of Magical Thinking | Joan Didion
A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty.
Friends,
You only have to google ‘grief’ and this book pops up immediately. I first read her when my mom died about 15 years ago, and more recently when I lost my doggie, PJ. I’ve found different parts of the same book each time.
This is a book about loss, and grief, and the year that followed after Joan Didion lost her husband John suddenly in 2003.
My favourite parts from my recent read:
“We are not idealized wild things.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”
“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. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.”
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”
‘This is a beautiful and devastating book by one of the finest writers we have. Didion has always been a precise, humane and meticulously truthful writer, but on the subject of death she becomes essential.’ Zadie Smith
