supporting loss
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This is a book I would recommend to people who have suffered a loss and for those that have not yet as it is educational.A personal experience of the loss and grief of death, written with honesty, beautiful yet devastating, a passionate account that does not hold anything back. A must read for anyone who is suffering with the loss of a loved one.
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Raw, Painful and Not to be Missed
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Joan Didion lost her husband, John Gregory Dunne, as they were sitting down to dinner on December 30, 2003. What follows is an amazing journey (one that hadn't been completed by the end of the book) through the deals we make with ourselves and with the World in order to avoid the unavoidable. This is NOT an inspirational story. It is raw, difficult to read, heartbreaking.
What is present in the telling is what the reader brings to it. Speaking for myself, I could thoroughly understand Didion's decision not to part with John's shoes, because he would need them "when he came back." Her coming back from a walk with news for him only to get all the way to the apartment before remembering. These are things that I have done, and until I sat down to read The Year of Magical Thinking, I thought I was the only one who grieved this way.
Didion spends a good deal of time on society's insistence that we not "dwell on" our grief or indulge in "self pity." The truth is that it is healthy to grieve, and that it has its own timetable for every single person who goes through it. This is one person's experience; it may not be yours, but it is educational in many ways. I find it amazing that the most accurate depiction of how to take care of a griefstricken person comes from a 1922 Emily Post book on etiquette. All these years later, and we have gotten farther from what is needed, not closer. This, for obvious reasons, saddened me more than anything I read in Year of Magical Thinking.
Knowing that shortly after Year was released, Joan Didion also lost her beautiful daughter, Quintana, only makes the experience more bitter. I am so grateful to Joan Didion for sharing her experience. I usually trade books after I've finished reading them - this one, I placed back on the shelf so that I can re-read, study and learn in future years.
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don't waste your time
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This book was way too long.... about 250 pages way too long in fact. I don't quite know what a reader is supposed to surmise from it. For a seemingly intelligent woman the author showed a remarkable lack of insight into the nature and existence of life and its end result. So caught up in the smallest detail (to a boringly obsessive degree in fact) the bigger picture was totally lost on her. I found it totally unmoving.
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Life-affirming
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Although the idea behind the book may sound a bit maudlin and miserable Didion is so lacking in self-pity and writes so eloquently and intelligently about the state of grief that it is anything but - if anything it is life-affirming. She has such dignity. Definitely worth a read, whether or not you are grieving yourself.
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The Year of Magical Thinking
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What a waste of time. I found this book very frustrating to read and I couldn't wait to finish it. Why did it win an award I have no idea.
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