Thoughts on The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

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I finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion just now. I expected to cry but I didn’t. not until the end did I tear up a little bit. Her grief for her husband was raw, very real, and compelling portrayed. She was able to meld her thoughts on death and her memories of her life with her husband into a unified, interesting reflection on time, change, and meaning. 

She left certain things underdeveloped, like the idea of meaning in life; she raised the question but never answered it. But I think that is not what this book was meant to do; perhaps the question was never answered, this loose end never tied, because the book is simply a reflection of her actual life. She doesn’t know the answer to meaning in her life. I found this sad, these loose ends. They were real, raw, and intriguing as a firsthand account of grief, but there was something missing. 

The last lines she writes are “You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.” Her account is a true witness of life and death, but Joan Didion’s grief is so heart-achingly sad because she has no hope. She doesn’t believe that there is Someone who is watching, Someone who cares, Someone to be with after death. She has no hope. 

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