Joan Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2006)

Didion explores a critical year in her life in its immediate aftermath. Her daughter experiences a near-fatal medical condition. Her husband dies at home in front of her. In short, her world stops, lets her off, and then proceeds to drive over a cliff. She is left standing at the top, watching, and wondering what the hell happened.

Grief is a funny thing, perhaps like addiction. It's difficult to explain to those who haven't been there, and to them, any description makes the experience seem silly and indulgent. Any description seems incomplete, though, inadequate to the strength of the emotions felt and not felt.

Didion's book is both frustrating and touching. I chalk this up to the idea that it was written less for her audience than for herself. It is almost like a diary… like having a coffee with someone who is grieving, and who is thinking out loud. Her writing is compelling. Her thinking is circular, repetitive, and obsessive. She second-guesses her decision, plays scenarios (important and innocuous) over and over through her thoughts, and members and re-members her memories, attempting to construct a clear, linear, comprehensible narrative that explains what she is feeling.

Jim Murdoch offers a very insightful review.

Some noteworthy quotations:
- Chapter 5: "one more case of maintaining a fixed focus on the clear blue sky from which the plane fell…"
I just really like this image. It captures grief so well.

- Chapter 15: "John would wait until I came uptown at eleven or so to have dinner with me. We would walk to Coco Pazzo on those hot July nights and split an order of pasta and a salad at one of the little unreserved tables in the bar. I do not think we ever discussed the convention during these late dinners. On the Sunday afternoon before it began I had talked him into going uptown with me to a Louis Farrakhan event that never materialized, and between the improvisational nature of the scheduling and the walk back downtown from 125th Street his tolerance for the 1992 Democratic convention was pretty much exhausted. Still. He waited every night to eat with me. I thought about all this on the Tower C escalator and suddenly it occurred to me: I had spent a minute or two on this escalator thinking about the November night in 2003 before we flew to Paris and about those July nights in 1992 when we would eat late at Coco Pazzo and about the afternoon we had stood around 125th Street waiting for the Louis Farrakhan event that never happened."
This section reminds me of Gertrude Stein's 'Making of Americans'. There's something about the elliptical narrative, the fruitless repetition that is observed but unstoppable which resides somewhere between obsession and compulsion which is fascinating.

- Chapter 22: "if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead."
This suggestion resonates, but is difficult to reconcile with my interest in memorialization, public history, and myth-making.