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kkendraa 's review for:
The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
5 stars because of how deeply I resonated with so much of this book; unfortunately (me self-pitying). Coming up on the one year anniversary of my moms passing and Joan writes towards the end, “I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. John did not see this day a year ago.” Thinking about the last times together such last vacations, last presents, last words hit home and is something I’ve been struggling coping with; the void of it all. Grief does in fact feel like suspense and Didion quotes C.S. Lewis “it comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual”. I loved chatting with my mom, the amount of times I have wished I could just chat about her own death to her have been many; I wish she her here to be a comfort through it.
To zoom out on the book as a whole, I believed it really encapsulated the grieving mind and how it jumps around. One minute Didion is talking about the story of her husbands death, to scientific research on cardiac issues, to a psychoanalysis on her own actions, to fixating “on locating the anomaly that could have allowed this to happen” and questioning how she could have helped or prevented the situation and then back to think pieces on grief. At first I thought wow this is kind of all over the place I thought this was more so a book on grief but then I zoomed out and realized how similarly her writing patterns throughout this book reflect many of my own ebbing and flowing thought processes. This book is physical evidence of grief not being linear and how you have to go with the change.
I’m not proofreading so disregard any spelling errors. This was more of a journal entry.
To zoom out on the book as a whole, I believed it really encapsulated the grieving mind and how it jumps around. One minute Didion is talking about the story of her husbands death, to scientific research on cardiac issues, to a psychoanalysis on her own actions, to fixating “on locating the anomaly that could have allowed this to happen” and questioning how she could have helped or prevented the situation and then back to think pieces on grief. At first I thought wow this is kind of all over the place I thought this was more so a book on grief but then I zoomed out and realized how similarly her writing patterns throughout this book reflect many of my own ebbing and flowing thought processes. This book is physical evidence of grief not being linear and how you have to go with the change.
I’m not proofreading so disregard any spelling errors. This was more of a journal entry.