The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion, 2005
Didion's account of the year after her husband's sudden death at the dinner table: a clear-eyed report on how a rational mind grieves.
Joan Didion
Didion and John Gregory Dunne were married for forty years, wrote screenplays together, and read each other's pages before anyone else did.
Feels like grief, death and melancholy.
How quickly an ordinary evening becomes the last ordinary one.
Chapter 1 1.Life changes fast.Life changes in the instant.You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.The question of self-pity.Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Notes on change.doc”) reads “May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.,” but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.For a long time I wrote nothing else.Life changes in the instant.The ordinary instant.At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, “the ordinary instant.” Books by Joan Didion
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