Publisher : Highbridge Audio
Publication Date : 2005 10 06
>> Kindred Spirit in Grief
When my brother Bart three and a half years my junior unexpectedly passed away last October I was devastated I had just signed a contract to write a new book for Alfred Publishing and I was paralyzed with grief depression and confusion The only activity that kept me from breaking down at every other tick of the clock was to write about my brother My book assignment was gonna have to wait
Of course I received plenty of sympathy and empathy from friends and acquaintances and strangers alike My dear friend Caroline Johnson who had lost two family members earlier in the year instructed me in no uncertain terms to put down whatever I was reading at the time and delve into The Year of Magical Thinking So as I winged westward to attend my bro s memorial I focused on Joan Didion s beautiful and candid memoir recounting one tragic annum in which she lost both her husband and her daughter
While I couldn t quite relate to the luxury hotel rooms and the perspective of the pampered literary aristocrat the emotional landscape was recognizable right away Grief is a strange and alien place to live where memory plays tricks and a random left turn down an unfamiliar avenue might dredge up the most profound and overwhelming feelings I felt comforted by this wonderfully courageous tome I don t know if I ll ever completely recover from Bart s sudden departure But Joan Didion s essential book certainly helped to get the healing started
I ve now passed my copy along to my sister in law with same instructions Caroline gave me
Rand Bishop author of Makin Stuff Up The Absolute Essentials of Songwriting Success and Grand Pop
>> good read for tough subject
I know many have already read this book or seen the play adaption I found it very helpful for her to focus on a year as her time length to share what she experienced Many of us think only of the first 2 3 months and then anniversary dates like birthdays holidays her candid and frank focus on missing the day to day exchanges with her husband on her negotiation skills with reality if only I think this keep these he will come back were validating and normalizing for the experience of losing an important person to death
>> Grief seen through the lens of one of our most gifted writers
The negative reviews of this book it seems to me come from people who seem to completely miss the point of the book This is ironic because in such classics as Slouching Toward Bethlehem and the White Album Joan Didion confronts those whose thinking seems to her to be completely beside the point
This book is not entitled the Year of Magical Feeling She feels bad folks He wasn t just her husband and the father of her daughter he was her working partner They disagreed and fought often and had struggles but they were always together and their respect for each other was apparent to all who knew them and some who didn t Perhaps that doesn t come through in this work perhaps I know that from other sources but I know it
Their daughter was adopted presumably after much struggling to have a biological child She was their only child and she was loved and indulged And they were always together on the East Coast and then on the West Coast and back to the East Coast they were always together
She felt really bad folks
But we knew that We could predict that We would expect that What kind of a story is that What insight and surprises does that offer
Ah but how did she THINK That s something else again She THOUGHT she couldn t get rid of her husband s shoes That is what we call an INSIGHT That is the kind of shared insight that some of us can relate to For five or six or seven years after my grandmother died I still wondered every Christmas what kind of gift I should get her
And how does she share those thoughts In gorgeous prose In terms of pure prose alone spare fluid rhthymic spot on prose there is noone like her She is one of the great American prose stylists of the modern era
And Didion also communicates acute observation because she is a writer and writers observe Everybody FEELS writers are no better at FEELING than anyone else but they are supposed to be better at OBSERVING
Finally the voyeuristic cathartic touchy feely outpouring that some of these reviewers seem to crave is not everyone s style Didion as her husband observed countless times as the doctor who called her a cool customer noted as you can see from her photo is a stoic in the best American WASP tradition The clash between her California frontier pioneer WASP demeanor and her husband s more raucous Northeast Irish Catholic style seems to have been a recurring motif in their lives The woman wrote an ode to John Wayne for Pete s sake
This may not be YOUR style truthfully it s not always mine and it may have faded from favor in this TMI let it all hang out keep nothing to yourself era of cheap trite overemoting but she represents a strong tradition of tough minded clear eyed American writing She prefers to show rather than tell
If you want to see people cry watch Oprah If you want an acutely observed and riveting description of how the mind and the perceptions of one very interesting woman were forever altered by the events of a very tragic year this is the book for you
