I think the first time I heard of Joan Didion’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking was actually when I read/watched an interview with Tyler Rasch (American/Korean TV personality) and he said it was the most beautiful book he’s read.
This isn’t the first work by Joan Didion I’ve read — I actually borrowed a copy of The White Album from Malia and skimmed through it, but didn’t find it interesting.
With this book, I read the first couple chapters carefully but skimmed the middle, and read the last couple chapters carefully. At a certain point, Didion started retelling the events surrounding her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness in a very repetitive fashion, and it almost felt like I was listening to her talk to herself and trying to make sense of those events in real-time. I guess in a way, I’m saying that it felt too diary-like or stream of consciousness-y for me — that thought made me wonder, why did she write this novel? For herself seems like the most obvious answer. I read a Goodreads review that said something along the lines of, this should have stayed private, as her own diary. But some diaries get published, no? Anyway, made me think a little bit about why people write, whether it gets published or not.
It feels weird to judge a book about someone’s process and experience of grief — especially when that very person has passed away — but I would say that this book didn’t quite live up to the ‘hype’ or expectations I had going into it. Nonetheless, there were some passages about grief that I want to note.
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.”
“…Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”
“Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
One of my Otero residents asked me if I had ever experienced grief. It was hard to tell them that, thankfully, no, I have not experienced grief, especially right after they told me that their mom had passed away from breast cancer. The saddest part was that they used to call their mom almost everyday, and especially when they needed someone to talk to and seek out comfort — not being able to call their mom at the end of the day — I can’t imagine how devastating that must be, and it scares me so much to think that that will happen to me to one day.
Up until just a few weeks ago, I had completely ruled out every living in or settling down in Korea — I couldn’t see myself working and living there, especially after having gone to school in California for eight or so years. But now, I can’t think of anything scarier than putting my personal ambitions first, living far away from family, and regretting the time I chose not to spend with my family. I feel a tectonic internal shift in priorities and possibilities now that I am beginning to think that I may want to live and work in Korea if that means I can live close to my family.
