the year of magical thinking

joan didion

i’ve always admired the honesty of writers who keep a record of their experiences through creative text, especially when their accounts thread a unique sense of vulnerability into the most ordinary realities of the human condition. 

The Year of Magical Thinking is no exception. joan didion’s storytelling is utterly perceptive, if not devastatingly so, yet fully brimming with a strange tenderness upon every turn of phrase and blunt stitching of candid sentence. 

her incisive translation of the parallel distance between living and dead, the all-consuming waves of grief that occur when simple life turns into sudden loss, feel detached in her narration of events, as if disengaged—severed—from her own prose. 

didion commits a gut-twisting lucid brevity to her abstractions of hopeless reveries, her inescapable wishful thinking for the sake of nursing emotional wounds; her language almost surgical in nature, like being cut open without anesthesia, without knowing exactly the source of pain, only that it seems to hurt everywhere.

i hesitate to write anything more, so instead i’ll leave you with a quote from the book that made me ruminate a lot about the life i’m so privileged to live and the idea of loss that until now still remains unknown:

“We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”