I went to three different bookstores today looking for a copy of Joan Didion's new book The Year of Magical Thinking. All three, sold out. And get this, it's a book about grief!
Based on the summary I have read, Joan Didion and her husband returned from the hospital where their daughter had gone into septic shock due to complications from pneumonia. That evening, her husband died silently of a massive heart attack as he sat in a chair. This memoir follows her journey of grief out of those terrible circumstances and back into a working renewed life. Here's a quote from the Publisher's weekly review:
"We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss," she writes. "We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes." Didion's mourning follows a traditional arc—she describes just how precisely it cleaves to the medical descriptions of grief—but her elegant rendition of its stages leads to hard-won insight, particularly into the aftereffects of marriage. "Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age."
This book debuted #4 on the New York Times bestseller list. Expect it to pop up in conversation sometime soon. You can find it here on Amazon.com.
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