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Rating:  -
I thought Ms. Didion's description of the feelings, sounds, emotions that we experience when we've had a tragic loss were astonishingly accurate. When faced with great tragedy and grief, it is remarkable that we can even get out of bed in the morning.
Rating: -
I've read this book a couple of times now and I am certain I will revisit it every couple of years because it is amazingly well written and emotionally so real. I read a few of the negative reviews of this book and was kind of mystified by them, the main criticism is that segments of the book are disjointed and draft-like, but that is actually partly the point of the book. This element reflects how loss of this magnitude jars human thoughts and behavior; in this case, how it forced a pattern of repetitive and irrational thoughts into her incredibly intelligent and normally rational mind. That within her head, was a confrontation between her past and present realities. It really imparts the nature of grief, external life goes on and seems almost just the same, so the adjustment really in one's head. It seems that Joan Didion wrote this to cope and almost get out of her own head.
This is all secondary to the best aspect of the book, which is that she intersperses these beautiful memories of her experiences with John and Quintana, and what one gets from this is the sense that Joan Didion had a fantastic life, that she had a true equal and partner with John. In reading about her past I felt that the author has had the kind of life that people want for themselves (I definitely envy the life she's lead), it was not perfect but her relationships and experiences were incredibly meaningful and satisfying. One gets a sense of how much she has lost. Indeed, because of this, the book isn't depressing, but bittersweet. The chapters balance her appreciation for having had such an incredible relationship, with an acute sadness over the loss her life-partner.
The point is, this book is incredible.
Rating:  -
This is a memoir told by writer Joan Didion on life immediately after the death of her husband, John Gregory Donne. (The book has been adapted into a one-woman broadway play as well.)
In the book, Joan Didion writes as if she's thinking out loud. You can tell that the story is written for herself as if therapeutic and not for the sole purpose of selling a book, full of honesty and humility. When I was reading it, I wondered about the author's purpose for writing, thinking that it must be (for lack of a better word) self-serving in some way. So that she can remember? So that she can chronicle her life? So that in this way she can bring her husband back? There are many times throughout the novel that she says she keeps expecting him to come back, although she knows that it defies all logic. One point of irony in the novel is that she says that she and her husband always discussed matters and that she had an overwhelming desire to discuss this issue with him.
Joan Didion retells the events from memory trying to locate the exact details, searching for meaning, putting the puzzle together. It is so important to her to not "betray" the story, or fail the accuracy of the story. She looks deeply into everything that her husband did leading up to the day of his death. She searches for symbols that she seemed to have missed. It is her belief that everything is connected.
From the moment her husband passes away, her daughter has complications and is in the hospital. Ms. Didion is so active with her daughter's situation that she doesn't have time to fully mourn. She says in the middle of the book that she has been in a period of grievance, not mourning. What I feel is absolutely tragic is that her daughter dies not long after, although this information is not told in the book.
Didion describes what she calls a vortex that takes her mind back to a place when she had her family. The dictionary defines "vortex" as a "place or situation regarded as drawing into its center all that surrounds it." She finds that everything is connected ultimately to her old life with her husband and daughter. Like playing the Kevin bacon game (in which you can start out with Kevin bacon and make connections with movies and ultimately end with Kevin Bacon in the end.)
This book obviously can connect with those who have lost a loved one, but I also think that it can give a new perspective to those who haven't.
Rating:  -
I have read most of Didion's books and so bought this at a used bookstore without knowing what it was about. Like many of the reviewers before me, the first few chapters describing her husband's death kept me reading, but by the middle of the book I found it a chore to pick up. The content became very repetitive and, as I moved through the pages, utterly hopeless in its tone. Having experienced grief myself and knowing the grasping for some truth that would tell me 'hold on, you will get through this,' I found no such message here and would not recommend this book to anyone grieving the loss of a loved one.
The other issue Didion dealt with at the same time as John's death was their daughter's mysterious illness. Unfortunately this issue gets lost in Didion's grief and there is no real outcome provided in the book. We know that Quintana got out of the hospital but nothing beyond that. The topic is simply dropped with no real emotion expressed by the author.
I feel that for a piece to be worthy of public consumption there ought to be something of value that readers can walk away with. Perhaps as a study of grief, Didion's book could rightfully find its way onto a handful of bookshelves, but as a general reader it is sorely lacking the author's trademark writing charm and expertise. In fact, it is poorly written. There is nothing magical here, except that someone gave the book a wonderful title that belies the meaning the author intended, that she suffered through a year of denial and as of the last page had not recovered from it. Now, almost 4 years after her husband's death, I hope Ms. Didion has found some of the peace she was obviously lacking when she wrote this book.
Rating:  -
This is in part a response to the other reviews. No, this is not a perfect book, though I don't know what it would mean to write a perfect book of this sort. I think that the most important thing to realize is that there are several possible audiences here. For those who have not experienced the sudden death of a close family member, the purposes of reading such a book could range from intellectual curiosity to emotional voyeurism (one senses that those who complained that the book was not cathartic do not understand that there is no resolution, there is no catharsis to be had, and thus they are looking for a certain kind of emotional stimulation and satisfaction, as opposed to truth, which I'm sorry to say is neither meaningful nor satisfying--they should probably rent _Titanic_ instead). For those who have a certain intellectual curiosity about what the experience of grieving the sudden death of a loved one is like, this is a useful, and I suspect, surprising book. It is emphatically not (as one grossly insensitive reviewer called it) an account of a mental illness or a demonstration of how unfortunate it was that Ms. Didion did not receive professional grief counseling as an adjunct to the other death anaesthetization services our death-denying culture urges on us in order to help support and reassure our fellows that they and those they need are the immortals their unconscious narcissism assures them they are. This is simply how it is guys, period. And fortunately, the book is brief (though in parts repetitive even so) so the genuinely curious can get information here they would not easily get elsewhere without too much investment. The third possible audience is the recently bereaved. Here it is somewhat more difficult to assess the usefulness of the book. There are moments in it that seem to absolutely *nail* experiences that I've seen described nowhere else (all the other texts I've seen focus to a remarkable extent on *sadness*, as if this were the dominant aspect or the worst of it, perhaps because sadness is one of the few emotions which the otherwise incommunicable experience of survival shares with "ordinary" experience). Yet I suspect that survivors will find this book somewhat less useful than they might think it would be, for the simple reason that we know these things already, and there is very little cash value in seeing that one's reactions are normal--we know that already. Still... there is great value in the occasional page that captures in words what you have felt that might otherwise seem beyond description. There is perhaps a vanishingly small audience that I should also mention, last but not least, though this is more aspirational than descriptive (there should be such an audience, but probably isn't). Montaigne said somewhere that philosophy is a preparation for death. The experiences Didion reports are quite awful and yet utterly normal, and whoever you are reading this, the odds are overwhelmingly good that you will experience them eventually. You might want to bone up beforehand.
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