The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion · 2005
Didion's husband died at the dinner table. Within the year her daughter would die too. She wrote about grief with the precision of a scientist and the rawness of a child, cataloguing the magical thinking the mind uses to resist the unacceptable. Changed what it is possible to write about loss.
The case against
Grief, in Didion's telling, happens at good addresses: Malibu, Beverly Hills, hospital corridors with connections to call. The looping repetitions mimic a stunned mind and also wear one. Her control never breaks; you watch a writer annotate her own devastation from behind glass, which is the achievement and the limit.
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