A year of Magical thinking, written by Joan Didion
2007 Book Club selection - Memoir
This is a very sad story of a year in Joan's life, her husband dies, her daughter is very sick and Joan has to find a way to survive. Didion is an accomplished writer, this novel is well written, slightly cold and removed. I felt that she might still be struggling as this novel ends.
Type: Memoir, 227 pages, trade paperback
Synopsis:
Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack. This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." With vulnerability and passion, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss. THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife, or child.