Title: The Year of Magical Thinking
Title: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Summary
“Life changes fast….You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year’s Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
The weeks and months that followed “cut loose any fixed idea I had about death, about illness, about probability and luck…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience. Her portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad, will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, a wife, or a child.
Probably one of the most important books I have read. Its insights are quite profound, as if one was given the chance to look in on someone being emotionally dissected. Ms Didion is an exquisite writer who is almost mythic in some respects. Being able to stand back from the pain of loosing loved ones and garnering the courage to share that experience is telling. I absolutely admire her for that. She is truly great and I very much recommend this book.
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