The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005, Hardcover)

I just went back and listened again to an interview by Terri Gross of NPR's Fresh Air in which Joan Didion describes that writing this book came automatically. This also is what I found about my reading of the book. It came automatically, keeping my attention riveted to the story, essentially of her husband's heart attack, occurring at the same time as her daughter, adopted and in her thirties, was facing a life-threatening battle with infection in a hospital ICU. As a married woman close to sixty, whose father and father-in-law both died of circulatory related problems in their early sixties, I was riveted to the spare, factual, honest account offered here by Didion. It does not suprise me that this account was brought to the stage by Vanessa Redgrave. Through the prism of a cataclysmic loss, Didion weaves memories even as she seeks to avoid the pain of remembering and gives us, as she states in the interview, a picture of a marriage. As it turns out, this book is also a helpful treatise on grief, one worthy of mention in university classrooms. I was further intrigued by the role, minimal though it apparently was, of Didion's Episcopal faith and her husband's Roman Catholic faith. Neither believed in the afterlife, while apparently valuing certain rituals and liturgy, as evidenced by the funeral ceremony. What I drew from this personally, as a Christian worshipping in a related denomination, ELCA, the Lutheran tradition, was that it is one thing to observe ritual, but another to find comfort and assurance during a time of challenge and grief. This book is brilliantly conceived and written and well deserving of the awards and recognition it has received.