Joan Didion

An autobiographical portrait of marriage and motherhood by the acclaimed author details her struggle to come to terms with life and death, illness, sanity, personal upheaval, and grief.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Zainab 

Natürlich kann man mehr als nur einen Menschen lieben, aber Ehe ist etwas ganz anderes. Ehe ist Erinnerung. Ehe bedeutet Zeit. Ich erinnere mich, was mir vom Freund eines Freundes erzählt wurde, der die Erfahrung der Ehe hatte wiederholen wollen; »Sie kannte die Lieder nicht«, hatte er gesagt. Ehe bedeutet nicht nur Zeit: Sie bedeutet paradoxerweise auch, die Zeit zu verleugnen. Vierzig Jahre lang habe ich mich mit Johns Augen gesehen. Ich wurde nicht älter. 

Aina

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

The death of a parent, he wrote, "despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”

aywen

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

In this book, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience - a portrait of a marriage - and a life, in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year's Eve - the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

martina

I needed to be alone so that he could come back.

Omina

Human beings, I read but did not need to learn, showed similar patterns of response. They searched. They stopped eating. They forgot to breathe. They grew faint from lowered oxygen, they clogged their sinuses with unshed tears and ended up in otolaryngologists' offices with obscure ear infections. They lost concentration. "After a year I could read headlines", I was told by a friend whose husband died three years before. They lost cognitive ability on all scales. Like Hermann Castorp they blundered in business and suffered sensible financial losses. They forgot their own telephone numbers and showed up at airports without picture ID. They fell sick, they failed, they even, again like Hermann Castorp, died

Laura Mei

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. Grief has no distance; grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. We anticipate, we know, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative   ̶ dislocating to both body and mind. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be healing; a certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We [cannot] know ahead of the fact   ̶ and herein lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is   ̶ the unending absence that follows. The void. The very opposite of meaning. The relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself. 

marian park

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.

lianna

The poems and the dances of the shades seemed the most exact to me.

Beyond or below such abstracted representations of the pains and furies of grieving, there was a body of subliterature, how-to guides for dealing with the condition, some “practical,” some “inspirational,” most of either useless. (Don’t drink too much, don’t spend the insurance money redecorating the living room, join a support group.) That left the professional literature, the studies done by the psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers who came after Freud and Melanie Klein, and quite soon it was to this literature that I found myself turning. I learned from it many things I already knew, which at a certain point seemed to promise comfort, validation, an outside opinion that I was not imagining what appeared to be happening. From Bereavement: Reactions, Consequences, and Care, compiled in 1984 by the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, I learned for example that the most frequent immediate responses to death were shock, numbness, and a sense of disbelief: “Subjectively, survivors may feel like they are wrapped in a cocoon or blanket; to others, they may look as though they are holding up well. Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.”

Here, then, we had the “pretty cool customer” effect.

I read on. Dolphins, I learned from J. William Worden of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate. Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost. Human beings, I read but did not need to learn, showed similar patterns of response. They searched. They stopped eating. They forgot to breathe. They grew faint from lowered oxygen, they clogged their sinuses with unshed tears and ended up in otolaryngologists’ offices with obscure ear infections. They lost concentration. “After a year I could read headlines,” I was told by a friend whose husband had died three years before. They lost cognitive ability on all scales.

On reflection I see the autopsy itself as the first example of this kind of thinking. Whatever else had been in my mind when I so determinedly authorized an autopsy, there was also a level of derangement on which I reasoned that an autopsy could show that what had gone wrong was something simple. It could have been no more than a transitory blockage or arrhythmia. It could have required only a minor adjustment—a change in medication, say, or the resetting of a pacemaker. In this case, the reasoning went, they might still be able to fix it.

I recall being struck by an interview, during the 2004 campaign, in which Teresa Heinz Kerry talked about the sudden death of her first husband. After the plane crash that killed John Heinz, she said in the interview, she had felt very strongly that she “needed” to leave Washington and go back to Pittsburgh.

Of course she “needed” to go back to Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh, not Washington, was the place to which he might come back.

The autopsy did not in fact take place the night John was declared dead.

The autopsy did not take place until eleven the next morning. I realize now that the autopsy could have taken place only after the man I did not know at New York Hospital made the phone call to me, on the morning of December 31. The man who made the call was not “my social worker,” not “my husband’s doctor,” not, as John and I might have said to each other, our friend from the bridge. “Not our friend from the bridge” was family shorthand, having to do with how his Aunt Harriet Burns described subsequent sightings of recently encountered strangers, for example seeing outside the Friendly’s in West Hartford the same Cadillac Seville that had earlier cut her off on the Bulkeley Bridge. “Our friend from the bridge,” she would say. I was thinking about John saying “not our friend from the bridge” as I listened to the man on the telephone. I recall expressions of sympathy. I recall offers of assistance. He seemed to be avoiding some point.

He was calling, he said then, to ask if I would donate my husband’s organs.

Many things went through my mind at this instant. The first word that went through my mind was “no.” Simultaneously I remembered Quintana mentioning at dinner one night that she had identified herself as an organ donor when she renewed her driver’s license. She had asked John if he had. He had said no. They had discussed it.

I had been unable to think of either of them dead.

The man on the telephone was still talking. I was thinking: If she were to die today in the ICU at Beth Israel North, would this come up? What would I do? What would I do now?

I heard myself saying to the man on the telephone that my husband’s and my daughter was unconscious. I heard myself saying that I did not feel capable of making such a decision before our daughter even knew he was dead. This seemed to me at the time a reasonable response.

Only after I hung up did it occur to me that nothing about it was reasonable. This thought was immediately (and usefully—notice the instant mobilization of cognitive white cells) supplanted by another: there had been in this call something that did not add up. There had been a contradiction in it. This man had been talking about donating organs, but there was no way at this point to do a productive organ harvest: John had not been on life support. He had not been on life support when I saw him in the curtained cubicle in the emergency room. He had not been on life support when the priest came. All organs would have shut down.

Then I remembered: the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office. John and I had been there together one morning in 1985 or 1986. There had been someone from the eye bank tagging bodies for cornea removal. Those bodies in the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office had not been on life support. This man from New York Hospital, then, was talking about taking only the corneas, the eyes. 

Then why not say so? Why misrepresent this to me? Why make this call and not just say “his eyes”?

 I took the silver clip the social worker had given me the night before from the box in the bedroom and looked at the driver’s license. 

Why make this call and not just say what you wanted?

His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.

The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted. The act of grieving, Freud told us in his 1917 “Mourning and Melancholia,” “involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life.” Yet, he pointed out, grief remains peculiar among derangements: “It never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment.” We rely instead on “its being overcome after a certain lapse of time.” We view “any interference with it as useless and even harmful.” Melanie Klein, in her 1940 “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” made a similar assessment: “The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness…. To put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it.”

Notice the stress on “overcoming” it.

It was deep into the summer, some months after the night when I needed to be alone so that he could come back, before I recognized that through the winter and spring there had been occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had also been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant. In retrospect there had been signs, warning flags I should have noticed. There had been for example the matter of the obituaries. I could not read them. This continued from December 31, when the first obituaries appeared, until February 29, the night of the 2004 Academy Awards, when I saw a photograph of John in the Academy’s “In Memoriam” montage. When I saw the photograph I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me.

I had allowed other people to think he was dead.

[...] I was trying to think what to do next when the phone rang. It was John’s and my agent, Lynn Nesbit, a friend since I suppose the late sixties. It was not clear to me at the time how she knew but she did (it had something to do with a mutual friend to whom both Nick and Lynn seemed in the last minute to have spoken) and she was calling from a taxi on her way to our apartment. At one level I was relieved (Lynn knew how to manage things, Lynn would know what it was that I was supposed to be doing) and at another I was bewildered: how could I deal at this moment with company? What would we do, would we sit in the living room with the syringes and the ECG electrodes and the blood still on the floor, should I rekindle what was left of the fire, would we have a drink, would she have eaten?

The instant in which I asked myself whether I had eaten was the first intimation of what was to come: if I thought of food, I learned that night, I would throw up.

We sat in the part of the living room where the blood and electrodes and syringes were not.

I remember thinking as I was talking to Lynn (this was the part I could not say) that the blood must have come from the fall: he had fallen on his face, there was the chipped tooth I had noticed in the emergency room, the tooth could have cut the inside of his mouth.

Lynn picked up the phone and said that she was calling Christopher.

This was another bewilderment: the Christopher I knew best was Christopher Dickey, but he was in either Paris or Dubai and in any case Lynn would have said Chris, not Christopher. I found my mind veering to the autopsy. It could even be happening as I sat there. Then I realized that the Christopher to whom Lynn was talking was Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who was the chief obituary writer for 

. I remember a sense of shock. I wanted to say 

 but my mouth had gone dry. I could deal with “autopsy” but the notion of “obituary” had not occurred to me. “Obituary,” unlike “autopsy,” which was between me and John and the hospital, meant it had happened. I found myself wondering, with no sense of illogic, if it had also happened in Los Angeles. I was trying to work out what time it had been when he died and whether it was that time yet in Los Angeles. (Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?) I recall being seized by a pressing need not to let anyone at the 

 learn what had happened by reading it in 

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.” Eric Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940s and interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

I had been asked before I left the hospital if I would authorize an autopsy. I had said yes. I later read that asking a survivor to authorize an autopsy is seen in hospitals as delicate, sensitive, often the most difficult of the routine steps that follow a death. Doctors themselves, according to many studies (for example Katz, J. L., and Gardner, R., “The Intern’s Dilemma: The Request for Autopsy Consent,” 

 3:197–203, 1972), experience considerable anxiety about making the request. They know that autopsy is essential to the learning and teaching of medicine, but they also know that the procedure touches a primitive dread. If whoever it was at New York Hospital who asked me to authorize an autopsy experienced such anxiety I could have spared him or her: I actively wanted an autopsy. I actively wanted an autopsy even though I had seen some, in the course of doing research. I knew exactly what occurs, the chest open like a chicken in a butcher’s case, the face peeled down, the scale in which the organs are weighed. I had seen homicide detectives avert their eyes from an autopsy in progress. I still wanted one. I needed to know how and why and when it had happened. In fact I wanted to be in the room when they did it (I had watched those other autopsies with John, I owed him his own, it was fixed in my mind at that moment that he would be in the room if I were on the table) but I did not trust myself to rationally present the point so I did not ask.

I used to have on a bulletin board in my office, for reasons having to do with a plot point in a movie, a pink index card on which I had typed a sentence from 

 about how long the brain can be deprived of oxygen. The image of the pink index card was coming back to me in the room off the reception area: “Tissue anoxia for > 4 to 6 min. can result in irreversible brain damage or death.” I was telling myself that I must be misremembering the sentence when the social worker reappeared. He had with him a man he introduced as “your husband’s doctor.” There was a silence. “He’s dead, isn’t he,” I heard myself say to the doctor. The doctor looked at the social worker. “It’s okay,” the social worker said. “She’s a pretty cool customer.” They took me into the curtained cubicle where John lay, alone now. They asked if I wanted a priest. I said yes. A priest appeared and said the words. I thanked him. They gave me the silver clip in which John kept his driver’s license and credit cards. They gave me the cash that had been in his pocket. They gave me his watch. They gave me his cell phone. They gave me a plastic bag in which they said I would find his clothes. I thanked them. The social worker asked if he could do anything more for me. I said he could put me in a taxi. He did. I thanked him. “Do you have money for the fare,” he asked. I said I did, the cool customer. When I walked into the apartment and saw John’s jacket and scarf still lying on the chair where he had dropped them when we came in from seeing Quintana at Beth Israel North (the red cashmere scarf, the Patagonia windbreaker that had been the crew jacket on 

) I wondered what an uncool customer would be allowed to do. Break down? Require sedation? Scream?

I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.

There was nothing I did not discuss with John.

Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other’s voices.

I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted. There was no separation between our investments or interests in any given situation. Many people assumed that we must be, since sometimes one and sometimes the other would get the better review, the bigger advance, in some way “competitive,” that our private life must be a minefield of professional envies and resentments. This was so far from the case that the general insistence on it came to suggest certain lacunae in the popular understanding of marriage.

That had been one more thing we discussed.

What I remember about the apartment the night I came home alone from New York Hospital was its silence.

Julia

Helen 

Dieses traurige aber inspirierende Memoir hat mich mitgerissen und mich in die Perspektive einer trauernden Person versetzt. Ich fand es nicht sentimental, sondern nüchtern, reflexiv und poetisch. Joan Didion beginnt an dem Tag, als ihr Ehemann verstirbt und ihre Tochter auf der Intensivstation lag, und erzählt bruchstückhaft von beider Leben. Sie versucht, einen Sinn aus all dem zu ziehen, was ihr passiert und passiert ist, Sie geht gedanklich immer wieder die Ereignisse der Vergangenheit durch und fragt sich, was sie hätte anders machen können. Ihre Memoiren sind geschmückt mit Zitaten und Romanausschnitten, mit ihren durchdringenden Gedanken und mit dem Leben, das sie einmal hatte.

Das Buch hat mir einen Einblick gegeben, wie es Menschen geht, die leiden, wie ihre Gedanken und ihr Verhalten aussehen können und wie man mit ihnen umgehen sollte.

Dieses traurige aber inspirierende Memoir hat mich mitgerissen und mich in die Perspektive einer trauernden Person versetzt. Ich fand es nicht sentimental, sondern nüchtern, reflexiv und poetisch. Joan Didion beginnt an dem Tag, als ihr Ehemann verstirbt und ihre Tochter auf der Intensivstation lag, und erzählt bruchstückhaft von beider Leben. Sie versucht, einen Sinn aus all dem zu ziehen, was ihr passiert und passiert ist, Sie geht gedanklich immer wieder die Ereignisse der Vergangenheit durch und fragt sich, was sie hätte anders machen können. Ihre Memoiren sind geschmückt mit Zitaten und Romanausschnitten, mit ihren durchdringenden Gedanken und mit dem Leben, das sie einmal hatte.

Das Buch hat mir einen Einblick gegeben, wie es Menschen geht, die leiden, wie ihre Gedanken und ihr Verhalten aussehen können und wie man mit ihnen umgehen sollte.

jude

Grief is a universal language and in some ways, I understood her. As humans, we never fully experience grief until one day it comes knocking on our door unexpectedly. 

Throughout reading, I can’t help but think about those who have to go through similar experiences with less connections or social status advantage. Although I won’t deny she’s at that level because of her hardwork. It’s just a food for thought that came across my mind. I got teary-eyed especially towards the end whilst reading.

Grief is a universal language and in some ways, I understood her. As humans, we never fully experience grief until one day it comes knocking on our door unexpectedly. 

Throughout reading, I can’t help but think about those who have to go through similar experiences with less connections or social status advantage. Although I won’t deny she’s at that level because of her hardwork. It’s just a food for thought that came across my mind. I got teary-eyed especially towards the end whilst reading.

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

This book may not have been life-changing, but it really was the first time in my life I've found someone who has the same line of thinking as I do. I would not have guessed to have found it in a writer known during the 60s but here we are. Didion tackles grief in such a didactic way as if it was a handwoven basket, carefully interleafing in each thread through an advanced weaving technique that allows it to create a beautiful pattern. I've never read a book thus far that handled grief in such a way. It was so refreshing, like I could relate to it in some way; even though, it never really happened to me. What is it in us that we shine light on people who try to hide their grief well? What is it in us that doesn't allow grief to be fully seen or heard? Why can't we ever allow ourselves to fully face the truth? 

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

This book may not have been life-changing, but it really was the first time in my life I've found someone who has the same line of thinking as I do. I would not have guessed to have found it in a writer known during the 60s but here we are. Didion tackles grief in such a didactic way as if it was a handwoven basket, carefully interleafing in each thread through an advanced weaving technique that allows it to create a beautiful pattern. I've never read a book thus far that handled grief in such a way. It was so refreshing, like I could relate to it in some way; even though, it never really happened to me. What is it in us that we shine light on people who try to hide their grief well? What is it in us that doesn't allow grief to be fully seen or heard? Why can't we ever allow ourselves to fully face the truth? 

Un libro prodigioso por su sinceridad y pasión conmovedoras, Premio Nacional de Estados Unidos a la Mejor Obra de No-ficción de 2005 (The National Book Award), escrito por una de las más emblemáticas escritoras norteamericanas. Joan Didion explora una experiencia intensamente personal y, no obstante, universal: el retrato de un matrimonio - y de una vida en los buenos y en los malos tiempos - que impresionará a cualquiera que haya amado a un marido, a una mujer o a un hijo. Unos días antes de la Navidad de 2003, Quintana, la única hija de John Gregory Dunne y Joan Didion, cayó enferma con lo que en un principio parecía una gripe, pero que rápidamente evolucionó a neumonía y acabó en un choque séptico. Durante varias semanas permaneció en coma inducido y con respiración artificial. Unos días después, la víspera de Nochebuena, los Dunne se disponían a cenar tras haber visitado a su hija en el hospital, cuando John Gregory Dunne sufrió un infarto mortal. En unos segundos, la relación íntima y simbiótica de estos dos escritores a lo largo de cuarenta años, acabó. Cuatro semanas más tarde, su hija superó el coma. Dos meses después, a su llegada al aeropuerto de Los Ángeles, Quintana cayó desplomada a causa de una hemorragia cerebral masiva y tuvo que ser sometida a una intervención de neurocirugía en el Centro Médico de la Universidad de California (UCLA). Este poderoso libro es el intento de Didion para encontrar sentido a las “semanas y meses que desbarataron cualquier idea previa que yo tuviera sobre la muerte, la enfermedad [...] el matrimonio y los hijos y el recuerdo [...] la precariedad de la cordura y sobre la vida misma”. Joan Didion Nació en California en 1934 y actualmente vive en Nueva York. Autora de cinco novelas: Run River, Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy y The Last Thing He Wanted; de ensayos sobre la cultura y la política norteamericanas como Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry y Political Fictions y de un libro de memorias, Where I Was From. El año del pensamiento mágico se publicó en Nueva York en octubre de 2005 y recibió The National Book Award en la categoría de no ficción. Aunque su hija Quintana pareció recuperarse durante la redacción de este libro, murió el 26 de agosto de 2005 a los 39 años.

El año del pensamiento mágico

Rocío de la Hera

Hay muchos libros sobre el duelo, pero no sé si alguno trabajará tan bien esta idea: el pensamiento mágico. La perdida absoluta de razón y lógica que sucede a la pérdida. Creer que el otro volverá y que al volver retomará su vida con total naturalidad. Creer que hay una arruga en el tiempo y que podremos colarnos por ella para volver al tiempo previo, donde el otro estaba. 
Me resultó demasiado personal, demasiado suyo, lo cual es lógico y se le agradece, pero por eso en ocasiones me distraía, como si no me correspondiese o, lo lamento, interesarse, meterme en esa historia. 
Muy muy interesante e íntimo.

Princess Doe 

3.5/5. While not the most transformative depiction of grief, it’s still worth it for anyone who may want to deal with grief

Louisa

I think I might read this again and then review it.

cried a lot and I never cry when reading so that tells you all you need to know 🙂‍↕️

muskaan bal

Filled with so much heart and loss. Not what I was expecting but everything I hope it would be at the same time. 

she repeats time and time again that she went to the literature for understanding and then she made this for all of us

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come.

Nova

i did not go into this thinking i would relate to didion, but grief is a universal language, and i understood her. while she did everything i did not while dealing with her grief, we had the same greed when it comes to making sense of things. i can see myself going back to certain chapters and/or passages whenever i feel stuck with my unprocessed grief. one passage that particularly resonated with me is the one touching upon self-pity in people who are grieving. she's so real.

The realest account of grief I’ve read thus far, Didion lays out her vulnerabilities in this personal recount. I like her careful, measured writing of the ways she grapples, rejects or accepts reality. I was having a reading block but something about her voice made me finish this book. I think I will reread this when I have those emotions of denial, disbelief, and irrationality surrounding grief. 

“We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” 

Xiang

The realest account of grief I’ve read thus far, Didion lays out her vulnerabilities in this personal recount. I like her careful, measured writing of the ways she grapples, rejects or accepts reality. I was having a reading block but something about her voice made me finish this book. I think I will reread this when I have those emotions of denial, disbelief, and irrationality surrounding grief. 

“We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” 

Rodrigo Figueiredo Severino

This one really hit home actually. It was really well done. Some of the analogies kinda went over my head, same with the technical medical terms, but this was beautiful

Isabella 

a beautiful, raw, and honest reflection on grief and mourning. it made me sad ):

Didn't expect the difficulty I experienced in reading this. Similar family experiences would flash through my brain, and I realized that maybe I've started to accept that the sensations those memories elicit will forever stay unresolved. 

As usual, Didion does it again with her ability to expand on and transcend an experience. I was in awe particularly with her ability to communicate the way she would navigate the tricks of the brain as a mechanism for survival when in a state of grief. Kept annotating that I remembered my mother a lot, and wondered if her feelings were similar back in 2021. Anyway, I am always in love with Didion's prose, and greatly admire her as a writer. 

Didn't expect the difficulty I experienced in reading this. Similar family experiences would flash through my brain, and I realized that maybe I've started to accept that the sensations those memories elicit will forever stay unresolved. 

As usual, Didion does it again with her ability to expand on and transcend an experience. I was in awe particularly with her ability to communicate the way she would navigate the tricks of the brain as a mechanism for survival when in a state of grief. Kept annotating that I remembered my mother a lot, and wondered if her feelings were similar back in 2021. Anyway, I am always in love with Didion's prose, and greatly admire her as a writer. 

D D D 

Beautiful. submerged in and surrounded by grief lately. well what can you do 

I think I would like joan didion more if I had a lot of money

y✦

✦ didion recounts 2 heartbreaking events in her life with sheer clarity 
✦ brilliant prose sprawled across pages 
✦ loss broken down at its most rudimentary, scientific even 
✦ wish i'd cried some more but clearly she didn't want me to

iamazoo

this absolutely destroyed me. both looking forward and dreading to revisit it in the future.

Hannah Lee

heartbreaking!! beautiful!! will never ever read this again!!!!!

Hannah

Extraordinarily compelling book about greif and devastating but important story

jennifer 

I’ll always be moved by a depiction of grief. it’s truly so interesting to see the difference in how you expect you’d react and how someone else will react to situations that will inevitably occur in life. situations that break your expectations of normal. seeing how Joan slowly allows collapse and then allows full realization and then rebuilds herself shows me a new way to react and I love that. Felt kinda mechanical at times but I appreciated that new perspective that’s different from my own. good read.

arth

The way Joan telling her journey of grieving reminds me that despite the loneliness and sorrow we, the people who grief have, we’re never been alone to suffer. Sometimes we lost but other times we just as wake as we used to be. There’s no due date of grief not it had specific way to come on us. Sometimes it’s the sudden feeling, sometimes it comes when we least expected it. Maybe my loss can’t be compared to someone else but reading this gives me lots of validations of what I’ve been feeling and I don’t regret it. The only thing that bother me is the pace and some of the context that I couldn’t really find myself connect with them because this is my first book of Joan. But despite the pace, I still love how she tells how she lives with grief ever since that day she lost her husband. It’s a solid 3 stars for me.

First time finishing a nonfiction on my own :) but truly heartbreaking story told in a beautiful way. 

Denisse Garcia Ramírez 

Mia Caven

as someone going through grief, not of death but still grief, this book really felt like a hug. didion understands the depths of grief. she knew that grief was all consuming and nothing to be ashamed of and although it sends you to the depths of hell and back, the light is still there. this is a very good beautiful book, and very short and quick. she was an excellent writer.

The Year of Magical Thinking

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