A Year of Magical Thinking

She said it was a good book. She put her hand over her heart and said “Oh” in that way that means something too beautiful for words. So I bought the Kindle book and I read it and I felt sad the entire way through. And it was beautiful. In a sort of “Oh, too beautiful for words” sort of way.

My coworker, Kaitlin, is an English Major. So when she recommended a book by Joan Didion I *uncomfortable cough* didn’t give the recommendation much credence. But I was out of ideas for new books and since the recommendation Kaitlin had proved here and there that she did indeed have good taste.
 

A Year of Magical Thinking (Book #23, by the by) chronicles the year following Joan’s husband’s death. He died suddenly December 30, 2003, by the fireplace in their living room shortly after returning from visiting their grown daughter, Quintana, who was unconscious in a hospital. What followed was a harrowing year of grief, mourning, her daughter’s terrible illness that required emergency brain surgery and the sort of magical thinking that kept insisting John would come back to her.

They had been married for about 40 years, spending most of those years working together, sharing their book ideas and thoughts, writing movies together, eating dinner, taking vacations, raising a daughter and weaving their lives together.

And then he was gone.

Joan talked about the tiny details of grief, like when she absent-mindedly flipped the page of the dictionary he kept on his desk. She realized suddenly that she had no idea what word he’d been looking up, that she’d flipped too many pages to remember which page he’d left it open to. In that moment she felt him slip further away and was sure it was her fault. The stack of books by his chair stayed there because that’s where he’d put them. She couldn’t give away his shoes because when he came back he would need them.

 It all made perfect sense to me. That fragile mind full of deep certainty even while you recognize you are making no sense. But you don’t have to make sense because this is your year, your year of magical thinking before you have to get back down to the brass tacks of life alone.

I finished the book and told Kaitlin I blamed her for my mental anguish. And then I put my hand over my heart and let my words trail off because sometimes a book is so vulnerable, so honest, so true and so sad that it is simply too beautiful for words.