My Favorite books and why I love them

The Year of Magical Thinking: Joan Didion

Rarely, I don't jump into a book with a feeling of excitement and eagerness. This book was different but in the best way possible.

I read this book a little bit after losing a family friend and then 6 months later losing someone else in that same family, both of whom left way too suddenly and way too early. It was the first time in my adult life I understood how painful grief can be. It is complicated, raw, and sometimes all-consuming. It eats at you and can make you feel paralyzed. Reading this book helped me deal with this.

Joan has been quoted as saying that writing is a hostile act and this book is just that. It is gritty and real but unimaginably beautiful in the way that it confronts how harsh life can be. She dives into the shock of losing her husband while her daughter is falling ill (who eventually passes and she writes her novel Blue Nights for her). The trauma of her husband dying and her daughter falling ill shatters her into a billion pieces and she has to make sense of her world after losing one of the most important people in her life. It is complicated and hard and nothing makes sense to her anymore and that is why I love this book.

It not only made me feel less alone in my grief but it helped confront an incredibly hard reality of adulthood. Life can be a bag of shit sometimes and there is not much we can do about it.

Poetic I know..

But in all honesty, this is refreshing for someone who is learning how to navigate your first experience with losing someone you know. The first line of the book is "Life changes fast, life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.” She confronts the fact that one moment is beautiful and mundane and in a second you can have the floor snatched out from under you. I found myself asking how the hell she kept going when she had so much trauma It was not always pretty for her but for a person who has had so much loss in her life she shows that life truly is precious. We revel in the tears and know that life is complicated. We need to live boldly and with conviction, holding onto the things that bring us joy and rivaling in the fact that we are here, no matter how we feel at that moment.