Thursday, June 01, 2006
i finished another book
Like Willie D, Joan Didion writes without romanticism. I finally finished her wonderful The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir thats equal parts love story to a past long gone and an ode to the Future. Short, heartfelt and full of grimy emotional moments, Didion uses nouns & verbs to punch symbolism, throw things at death and scream for 200 pages about how and why her husband, John Dunne, died the way he did (at dinner, of cardiac arrest). Didion, a great journalist, talks facts as much as poetics. What was it that her husband actually had? And when her daughter was in a coma, she sought out medical journals and pre-search engine paper things to help her brain understand the emotional horror. With one of the best passages on grief I have ever read, she proves to be gifted at presenting tiny moments of hope.
Endings are never real, she seems to say.
