:INFO
The Book That Named the Things Grief Does
Joan Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne died of a heart attack at the dinner table while she was making the salad. The Year of Magical Thinking is the book she wrote about the year that followed. It is precise in a way that grief usually is not. Didion catalogs the irrational thoughts, the bargaining, the impossible logic of believing that something might be undone. I read it three years after a significant loss and found it named things I had not been able to name myself.


:COUNTER.half
1 Year of Grief
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:NOW.half
Thinking about why grief makes the mind reach backward

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Joan Didion]
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.


:JOURNEY
Reading The Year of Magical Thinking
5 Most precise
5 Named something real
4 Clinical and devastating
4 Honest refusal

:NOW
Thinking about whether to reread it this year or wait until I am ready for it again, which is not the same as being ready for the grief it holds.

:NOTE
This book is not comfort reading. It is accurate reading. Those are different things and both are valid depending on where you are when you pick it up.