The Year of Magical Thinking
A lot of people have been touched by Joan Didion's award-winning memoir of the year she coped not just with her husband's sudden death from massive cardiac arrest but her daughter's hospitalization for a flu that became a life threatening systemic infection. Though riveted by the author's minute self-observation of her precarious and shift states of mind, I also found it excruciating. Didion describes herself as a person unafraid of facts, who likes to be "right" and now finds herself in a situation where she is fibbing to herself. And she's courageously aware of her own coping mechanisms and their craziness, while she's invested in believing them. Of course that is the stance of many of Didion's fictional heroines, who pride themselves on not succumbing to self-deception. In Play it as it Lays, the fictional heroine's gimlet eye is deeply ironic and as seductive as Chandler's Marlowe. In The Year of Magical Thinking, that character ha...