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Description
From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage--and a life, in good times and bad--that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis
Summary
They'd just returned from the hospital where their daughter was staying due to a serious pneumonia infection that had sprung fron the flu. She was in the ICU. While cleaning up, Didion realizes that her husband is slumped over.
"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)
Cast of Characters/Important People
Memorable Quotes
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“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us”
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“Confronted with certain disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.”
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“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.”
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“Why do you always have to be right? Why do you always have to have the last word? For once in your life just let it go.”
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“Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.”
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“Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.”
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“People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as "dwelling on it."”
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“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or worse, ourselves.”
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“We are not idealized wild things.”
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“The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking place. I look for resolution and find none.”
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“I also know that if we are to live ourselves, there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let them go in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.”
First Sentence
Life changes fast.
Table of Contents
Authors & Contributors
- Joan Didion (Author)
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