- June 17, 2022
L'année de la pensée magique - Roman/ récit - Joan Didion - Livre de poche, 2009
One evening, the writer's husband, Joan Didion, dies suddenly of a heart attack after 40 years together and as many years of intellectual companionship. For a year, the great American writer scrutinizes the mourning process and tries, through her writing, to make sense of this death, while at the same time looking after their comatose daughter. With her usual rigor and near-clinical precision, Joan Didion observes and analyzes the emotions that run through her in the year following her husband's death. She evokes disbelief, denial, guilt and immense grief. She makes and unmakes, retricks endlessly the dialogues she would have liked to have had or remade with the man who shared her life. She speaks of lack, regrets, lost or missed moments. She verges on madness, clinging to her pen like a lifeline. The author's relentless honesty makes her story universal. She also manages to speak of the void left by the absent. A part of her, too, is gone. She must find a place, a presence in the world. To become part of the world of the living again. The story, strong and sober, is also tinged with the concern she feels for their hospitalized daughter. This short, hard-hitting book is a diary of a woman's grief, lucid and accustomed to uncompromising introspection. Many mourners will find themselves going through this year of magical thinking, wishing that everything would go back to the way it was before death.
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