A Future Year

Our next pick for bookclub was The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion. I picked it up today, intending to start it, but ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting. And before you think that's an amazing feat, I will let you know that the book is only 227 pages long.

This book is about a terrible year in Didion's life. Her only child, Quintana was severely ill with pneumonia and in ICU in hospital just after Christmas. On December 30, 2003, Didion's husband, John Dunne, died suddenly in their home of a heart attack. This is Didion's account of her grieving/mourning process during that year. Her daughter recovered, only to fall ill again shortly after the funeral in March 2004. She never fully recovered (I think) and died in August 2005, after this book was published.

Given its subject matter, this is a hard book to critique. Can one say anything bad about it and not appear unfeeling? It is also hard in that I have never experienced an experience like the author went through - losing her husband of 40 years. Who knows how I would feel in such a situation and if it would be like what the author is feeling.

The book is not so much a description of her year as a series of disjointed thoughts and stories about her past with John and Quintana, and the present, in which she struggles to be there for Quintana and maintain a semblance of normalcy after her husband's death. As such, it is random, really without conventional structure. It is one of those books that you awake from it feeling fuzzy and disjointed.

I can't really say that I enjoyed the book, but I'm not sure this is the kind of book you can enjoy. Did it make me feel sad? No, not really. I don't know Joan, John, and Quintana, and even after reading this book I still don't really feel as if I did. I hope it helped the author to write this book - maybe it was cathartic for her. However, I think grief and mourning is such an individualistic process that the book may not be comforting for those who are experiencing such a great loss, and may be distancing for those who haven't experienced a loss of that magnitude. For I did feel, throughout the book, that the author was keeping me at arm's length, to a certain extent, and not really letting me in and letting me get to know her and her family. I couldn't put myself into her shoes to feel what she was feeling.

Perhaps I just don't get it. Perhaps I'm at a stage of my life right now where I can't get it. And that's fine. I can always try again later, if I need to. There are many books I've come back to when I'm older and found something new in. I thought that once I was an adult, that would change, but that is not so. I think this is one I will have to come back to when I'm a little older, a little more experienced. I'll try reading it with fresh eyes in about 10 years or so, and see what my thoughts are on it then.

On slightly more positive note, I am happy to say that the bookclub has decided to keep going into the fall! Instead of a book a month, however, we have decided that (with the increased busy-ness of fall) to read a book every two months. Our September-October pick: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.