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?
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It's weird. I think the book is amazing, as a document of personal loss, as a piece of prose, but it was difficult to read.
Her motivations? Who knows, really. She talks quite a bit about being a writer and the fact that it's just how her mind works; it's how she deals with experience — trying to make sense of it by intellectualizing it, by assembling all the facts and hoping thereby for an explanation, a "solution" to the grief. I had a sense that she had to proceed that way as a survival tactic of sorts, too — a desperate attempt to shift the pain from her heart to her brain, where it can be better "managed," but she knows this is illusory, too.
Funny that you call it an intensely private and personal story. I didn't find it overwhelmingly private. There were many places where I wanted to know more about their life together, and I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't a memoir of their life; it was a memoir of his death and how she coped with it. She maintained a very steady focus, which I imagine was difficult to pull off.
I've read a few memoirs by gay men who lost their partners to AIDS, and those seemed way more private and personal to me, but maybe there was a "political" impetus to those stories, in addition to the "personal" one, that heightened that sense for me.
I guess my sense of it's private nature came from the fact that I don't think people talk easily about grief. Especially about all the "magical thinking" she did which seemed 100% ordinary to me as a part of the grief process.
But most people (that I've encountered anyway) won't admit that the reason they are keeping the clothes in the closet is so the deceased can wear them upon return. Perhaps they won't admit that to themselves either.
I wasn't really clear how much she was aware of such patterns of thought while they were happening or if was only in hindsight that she could trace her unrealistic thinking.
Why was it difficult to read, kc?
It was difficult because it was brave and filled with pain cloaked as control.
My aunt, who lost her husband — suddenly — a few years ago, called my mom the other day and told her not to let anyone try to make my grandma get rid of my grandpa's clothes. "She'll do that when she's ready," she said.
I picture my grandma one day just realizing that, yes, it's really over and done with. These are just garments that are no longer related to my experience.
I can imagine why she wanted to write it. When my dad died during my sophomore year of high school, almost everything I wrote in English class was about his death. My state writing assessment essay was about my reactions to his illness and his death and the way it all surprised me. I was sort of fascinated by the process, and I sensed some of that from Didion, too.
That doesn't surprise me. I could see a little of Didion in you while I was reading, Erin.
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