Joan Didion is known for doing her homework. Her non-fiction is well-researched, and this,
hand in hand with her penetrating mind and incisive use of the language,
provide pleasurable reading like few other living writers can provide.
This is the case with The Year of Magical Thinking.
But here, the focus is on the inexorable process of grieving, and Didion
takes it on like a case study of how the mind works as it tries to wrap itself
around the unthinkable. This makes the
book a bit maddening. Didion moves
around the same topics, picking them apart, breaking them down, reenacting them
again and again like thought experiments.
Yet the
effect is mesmerizing. Didion comes very close to getting down in writing
an experience that makes every effort to escape from our ability to capture it
in writing; to conceptualize and understand its immensity.
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