Finished: The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion) Joan Didion's memoir of the year after her husband, writer John Dunne's, sudden death. For some reason I was thinking this book would be more uplifting, but it was really a study in the depth of grief, many of the experiences so similar to what I experienced after my brother's death. Things like this "One day when I was talking on the telephone in his office I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary that he had always left open on the table by the desk. When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking?" I can't tell you how real a moment something like that is. Well, I mean, you understand if you have lost someone close to you. Anyway, in writing what her first year without her husband of forty years was like, Didion also writes "Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention." I thought that was very profound as well and wonder if I've been grieving for almost twenty years, but not yet dealing with the grief? Hmm... In Didion's book, the other horrifying event was that her newly married daughter happened to be in the ICU battling pneumonia which had morphed into life-threatening sepsis. I'm sure the stress of that added to her husband's heart attack. How completely shocking and awful for Joan Didion. :-( I'm honestly surprised she was able to write about her experiences, but I'm glad she did. When she writes about bounding into the house, eager to talk to John about something from her day, only to realize that he wasn't there to talk to, I know that exact feeling. I remember so completely intuitively wanting to call my brother after seeing Titanic to compare notes, only to realize, yet again, that he wasn't there to talk to. Anyway....a very deep and moving book, but certainly one that takes me back to all these thoughts rather than propelling me forward!