The Year of Magical Thinking (25)

Title: The Year of Magical Thinking
Author: Joan Didion
Genre: Memoir, Non-Fiction

I think perhaps that it's wrong to say I love a book that is so filled with a real person's real pain. To love, and therefore enjoy, such a book seems selfish and yet I cannot help but say that I deeply loved this book. Didion's prose is straightforward and direct, not flowery but not quite Hemingway stark either. The tone ranges from slightly detached and clinical to deeply emotional, though still restrained. 

The book is completely and totally about the author and her responses to her husband's death and the serious illness of her adult child. It's all her and it is deeply honest, true and emotionally raw. I was tremendously moved.

I read a passage out loud to B where Didion is examining different kinds of bereavement. Pathological is the worst type, it's most difficult to deal with and recover from. It's also known as "complicated grief." Specifically I read to B where Didion learns from medical texts that this complicated grief frequently occurs when "the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another."

Didion quotes a medical text: " Was the bereaved actually very dependent upon the deceased person for pleasure support or esteem? Did the bereaved feel helpless without the lost person when enforced separations occurred?"

Reflecting on this quote I said to B "we're fucked." She said "Yep. I happily acknowledged our co-dependence many years ago and we'll deal with the dramatic grief that will bring later on."