And suddenly to be thrown back to this fourteen-year-old helplessness.” I mean, part of growing up for me was getting a finish, an impenetrable polish. “I had spent so much of my life guarding against being raw. Like they ought to be wearing dark glasses, not because they’ve been crying but because they look too open to the world.” It was this rawness that shocked her, she said. Joan said it came to her that everybody she’d known who’d lost a husband, wife, or child looked the same: ![]() I found this comment in an interview in the Huffington Post noteworthy: Rich people are allowed to lose loved ones too and grieve in their own way. Listening to Liza Minnelli talk about her childhood makes me feel the same. One of the reviewers who only gave the book one star-and there were a few (3% on Goodreads which amounts to over 1400 people)-said, “I found only brief spots of actual grief for Didion's husband and daughter, but they weren't enough to overpower my loathing for the author and her self-importance.” I can’t say I loathed the author despite her privileged lifestyle which as far as I can see she worked to attain and there wasn’t enough name-dropping to annoy me in fact I found it oddly sweet that Katharine Ross taught Didion’s daughter to swim. ![]() This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. Towards the end of the book once she starts to pull things together as a form of protracted summary over the last three or four chapters I started to feel a bit for her but her accounts of her husband’s death and the events leading up to his being declared dead (two different things) as well as her accounts of her adopted daughter Quintana’s two extended stays in hospital-twice the girl is at death’s door-were delivered with such dispassion and objectivity that despite the amount of detail, the clinical detail if you will, there were times when I felt like I was reading a textbook rather than a memoir: I begin with this not because I think that the loss of a goldfish equates with the loss of a partner but just to show what a softie I am. At one point I walked back into the living room and my wife asked me, “How’s Fishy doing?” to which I replied, “He’s dying.” At which point I cried. We’d had him for eight or nine years and would’ve happily hung onto him for another eight or nine but he became ill, was refusing food and in the end the kindest thing was to euthanise. I began reading this book the day after my goldfish died. ![]() – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.
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