Re-read

I am re-reading Joan Didion's masterpiece (and I don't use that term lightly), The Year of Magical Thinking, in conjunction with the development of Plan B. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it (actually I think it is better the second time around), not only for the content but for her magical style.

The book, which won every prize imaginable last year, is about Didion's recovery (if there is such a thing) from the sudden death of her husband John Dunne. (The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the couple's only child also died about a year after Dunne but the book was already out by then.) It chronicles in personal and objective terms the process of grief, the year of irrational or "magical" thinking in which the bereaved is literally incapable, on a certain level, of processing the reality that their loved one is gone, even as they go through the motions of acknowledging it. Heavy, perhaps, but also incredibly real, sometimes comical and amazingly well written.

I am re-reading it because Didion catalogues the process of grief in such personal terms that it becomes general. It is her story but it is also the story of anyone who has ever lost any living being, human or animal, that they loved. You see where I'm going here--it is also Gretchen Jackson's story, one which it may have taken her a year to be able to tell.

"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends," writes Didion. The simple truth on so many levels. How we adapt to the changes is what makes us turn the pages.