Erin's pick

The suck

I was struck over and over again by Didion's description of "the vortex" as if these memories of home and family life were a black hole, dangerous and difficult to escape. Yet, for me, those stories were some of the best reading of the whole book. They provided the back story we needed to understand the family relationships. Do you think the vortex provided any positive purpose for Didion? Or did she simply recount those episodes as a good writer for our benefit?

heart trouble

Didion and her husband seemed to react very differently to his heart condition ("they call it the widow-maker"). Was she unwilling to face the severity of his condition? If so how did that influence her grieving process after his death?

Magical thinking

Do you think the term "magical thinking" is a good description of Didion's mind beset by grief? What was magical about it? Have you ever experienced anything like this, as a consistent thought pattern or as a momentary occurrence?

Words of comfort

kc asked in a previous comment about the messages families find most comforting in the midst of funeral services.

What messages about life/death/John do you think Didion most needed to hear from her friends and family? What messages did she most consistently tell herself?

What have you most needed to hear when grieving a loved one?

Graphic Storytelling

We encountered "graphic" in a different way this month. Didion was intent on sharing with us precise details about the occurrence of John's death and Quintana's illness(es), letting the reader expereince the scene first hand.

She also seemed moved by grief to gather information, via Internet, reference materials, Doctor friends and by hounding hospital staff. Did you appreciate the vividness of the scenes she described and her explanations of all the medicine involved?

In the midst of life we are in death

We begin with Joan Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking"

What are your first impressions of the book as a whole? Why do you think Didion wrote it? What were her motivations? What did it accomplish for her to put an intensely private and personal story out for all the world to see? Could you imagine doing the same thing?

"The Power of Forgetting"

I’m reading this collection of essays about Shakespeare’s plays, called “Shakespeare After All,” and in the “Hamlet” essay, the author, Marjorie Garber, says something that made me think of “Maus” and how its various survivors, including Art, were able to function after such tragedy. Any thoughts on this?

Friedrich Nietzsche saw memory as that which distinguishes human beings from animals. Cattle forget, and so they are happy. Humans remember, and so they suffer. “In the smallest and greatest happiness,” he wrote in his essay on history, “there is always one thing that makes it happiness: the power of forgetting.” Human beings, both individually and as a people, “must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember.” And in the same essay Nietzsche also wrote, with a glance, unmistakably at “Hamlet,” that the past has to be forgotten “if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present.”

(The Nietzsche essay she refers to is “The Use and Abuse of History”)

Amy's Pick

I should have picked this two weeks ago. Sorry. The short time frame means you have been saved from several obscure picks I was considering. Instead Didion, a memoir of the year after her husband's death. Enjoy.

"Getting in touch with my inner racist"

Rather strange Speigelman essay in Mother Jones: "Getting in touch with my inner racist"

The ending

I found the ending pretty sad. First we see Vladek and Anja's reunion after the war, and Vladek says, "We were both very happy, and lived happy, happy ever after." But we know that's not true. Anja eventually committed suicide, and Vladek became a miserable old man. And in the last line, Vladek confuses Art with his dead son, Richieu. It's as though the tragedy of the past will never really be over for this family.

"Prisoner on the Hell Planet"

What were your thoughts on the comic within the comic, Art's reaction to his mother's suicide? The comic depicts his mother's suicide and his father's reaction. Art is wearing a concentration camp uniform throughout. In the last panels, Art is shown in prison, and he says, "Well, Mom, if you're listening ... Congratulations! You've committed the perfect crime ... You put me here ... shorted all my circuits ... cut my nerve endings ... and crossed my wires! You murdered me, Mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!"

I found this rather disturbing. What was your reaction?

All there is to know

Have you seen this Leonard Cohen poem about Adolf Eichmann, who was considered the mastermind of the Nazis' "final solution"? I think of it every time I read something about the Holocaust.

All there is to know about Adolf Eichmann

EYES - Medium
HAIR - Medium
WEIGHT - Medium
HEIGHT - Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES - None
NUMBER OF FINGERS - Ten
NUMBER OF TOES - Ten
INTELLIGENCE - Medium

What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?

Comparisons

Do you see any parallels in the struggles for survival in "Maus," "The Road," "A Thousand Splendid Suns"?

I saw something of Desdemona and Lefty from "Middlesex" in Vladek and Anja — the same sense of bewildered sadness of people ripped by war from their native land and cast upon the shores of America, a busy, naive country that was largely ignorant of and indifferent to their personal pasts and struggles. I keep trying to imagine what it would be like to be uprooted as an adult and replanted in a foreign country. It's really something. And on top of that, to have a personal history of unspeakable suffering.

Lost history

What was your reaction to Vladek's destruction of his wife's journals?

Empathy II

I'm always shocked when I see people who have been victimized by prejudice victimizing others. I always — naively — expect them to have been ennobled by their suffering, to be empathetic, to know what matters. And yet the author shows his father, a Holocaust survivor, being racist toward a black man. Why do you think the author included that episode?

Vladek

What connections did you make between the father's Holocaust experiences and his life in New York?

Honesty

I was really moved by the sheer honesty of these books — not just the author's honesty that his dad often drove him crazy, but the honesty of the concentration camp story, how it wasn't just a simple tale of good and evil, how it managed to convey the complexity of human behavior under extreme stress. Any thoughts on this?

Empathy

I think the thing that struck me most deeply about "Maus" was the depiction of the father-son relationship — how the fact that his parents' Holocaust experience was the huge, inescapable fact of their existence and yet how they had all this "normal" strife and personality conflicts like family members do. When I was reading it, I thought anyone who lived through the Holocaust should get a free pass to be a jerk or a tightwad or whatever else their psyche needed and the rest of us can only look on with infinite understanding. But I know it's one thing to hold that theory and another thing to actually practice it when faced with the everyday reality of a difficult person. Did you feel this struggle in the narrator?

Graphic storytelling

First, the obvious question: What did you think of the "comic-book" treatment of this serious subject matter?