Didion's Year

I've just finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It was the winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2005. The book is an intensely personal account of the year following the sudden death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, a year that also saw their only daughter fight for her life in hospitals in New York and Los Angeles. Didion describes it as a year in which all previously held ideas about marriage and children, and grief and sanity were shaken. A concluding thought "time is the school in which we learn," rings true and hauntingly.

It's an interesting book. I found it rather remarkable that she could piece together so much detail of a year past: dates, events, times, medical reports, even one evening's supper menu. The book is as much about her life as a writer - the way she works - a keeper of notes, journals, reasearch, even a kitchen diary. I like her writing. In a way, it's a bit dis-jointed and non-linear, although it loosely follows the year. But it is more the re-counting of her thoughts in the year that is important - lines from poems, pieces of her husband's novels, remembered conversations, insights.