i finished this book a week ago, and i can't stop thinking about it. i don't normally tell people to read books, especially not on a blog. it's so presumptuous. being told by someone else to read a particular book always has the effect of making me want to hate the book instantly and postpone reading it for at least a year. a year... a year of magical thinking.
life changes fast.
life changes in the instant.
you sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
this refrain is repeated throughout the book. this marvelous, wondrous little book. a a year of magical thinking is about many things but it is mostly, in blunt terms, about death. it is a book about coming to terms with death, or how a human being might begin to try.
several days before christmas 2003, joan didion's only daughter fell ill with what seemed like flu and was soon diagnosed as septic shock. she was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. days later, didion's husband john gregory dunne sat down to dinner with his wife and suffered a massive and fatal coronary.
this book is joan didion's attempt to make sense, or make something, of those days, and the ones which followed, and the ones revisited in her memory and imagination. a year of magical thinking is a captivating narrative, poetic and unassuming in its raw observations and subtle beauty, rich in its humour and self-reflection, honest in its anger and complicated grief.
life changes fast.
life changes in the instant.
you sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
read this book.
