by Joan DidionI picked this up because the font-filled cover page sucked me in. It was a whimsical font and the title suggested a few hundred pages of floating around like angels and sprinkling fairy dust. This is why one should read the synopsis on the back of the book. The Year of Magical Thinking was actually the author sharing her first year of coping with her husband's death and the near-death of her daughter.
I appreciated Didion's honest account of her grief. I didn't expect to be so captivated by it. At one point I felt her sorrow enveloping me and I had to yield to the tears and found myself begging my husband not to die. I probably would have been happier floating around like an angel but I was too far into the book to bail out.
The problem I had with The Year of Magical Thinking, and it's a re-occurring problem for me, is that I felt like whatever words Didion chose to express herself were getting in the way of what she was actually trying to express. The words were horribly insufficient and even misleading at times. I have an overwhelming feeling that being in her head and having experienced what she did is vastly different than the words she wrote about it. I never write poetry but I think loss and grief are things that poetry can capture much better than prose. Prose can be frustratingly limiting.
General consensus: A solid account of grief.
No comments:
Post a Comment