Saturday, December 17, 2011

The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion


“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 their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

This book is a great gift for anybody who is grieving. Didion wrote this book after her husband suddenly passed away followed by their daugther. This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

Click Here to listen or read her NPR interview about the book and how such a strong woman deals with her own grief.

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