The Year of Magical Thinking

"Life changes fast
Life changes in an instant
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."
Thus begins Joan Didion's chronicle of loss and bereavement. Her husband and dearest friend of forty years died in front of her at the dinner table. Their daughter was hospitalized and comatose at the time. She dissects her grief with the same precision that she applies to all her writing. It is almost elegic in its treatment of John's death and Joan's survival of it. Such public pining could be cringe-inducing but this novel is painstakingly well-shaped and elegant and never, at least to me, self-pitying. I've read everything Joan Didion has written; some of her non-fiction revealed so much of her as a person that, in a sense, I knew her. Reading this book felt a lot like having an honest and difficult discussion with a friend.