The Year of Magical Thinking (edit title)

Suze edited the ridiculously simplified synopsis of The Year of Magical Thinking Tuesday, August 18 2009.

• Edited: Didion'sDidion writes about her grief at the loss of her husband diesand the illness of her daughter is hospitalized and then re-hospitalized.only child.

jenn o edited the quotations of The Year of Magical Thinking Saturday, August 1 2009.

• Added a quotation: “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.”
• Added a quotation: “We are not idealized wild things.”
• Added a quotation: “The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking place. I look for resolution and find none.”
• Added a quotation: “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.”

jenn o edited the quotations of The Year of Magical Thinking Saturday, August 1 2009.

• Added a quotation: “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.”
• Added a quotation: “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.”
• Added a quotation: “Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.”
• Added a quotation: “Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.”
• Added a quotation: “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."”

jenn o edited the summary of The Year of Magical Thinking Saturday, August 1 2009.

• 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 ends.
  The question of self-pity."

  She calls the ambulance and the paramedics work on her husband. They take him to the hospital. He is DOA. She attempts to make sense of his death, of his life (he has this overriding foreboding that this is how he will die, and she wonders at herself that she scoffed at his fear instead of really listening."

  Through all this, of course, she still has to help her daughter through her hospitalization and then subsequent readmittance soon thereafter.

  As Didion puts it:

  "This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

jenn o edited the quotations of The Year of Magical Thinking Saturday, August 1 2009.

• Added a quotation: “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.”

jenn o edited the first sentence of The Year of Magical Thinking Saturday, August 1 2009.

• Life changes fast.

jenn o edited the summary of The Year of Magical Thinking Saturday, August 1 2009.

• 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 ends.
  The question of self-pity."

  She calls the ambulance and the paramedics work on her husband. They take him to the hospital. He is DOA. She attempts to make sense of his death, of his life (he has this overriding foreboding that this is how he will die, and she wonders at herself that she scoffed at his fear instead of really listening."

  Through all this, of course, she still has to help her daughter through her hospitalization and then subsequent readmittance soon thereafter.

jenn o edited the characters of The Year of Magical Thinking Saturday, August 1 2009.

• Changed the section title: Cast of Characters/Important People
• Added a character: Joan Didion
• Added a character: John Gregory Dunne
• Added a character: Quintana Dunne

jenn o edited the ridiculously simplified synopsis of The Year of Magical Thinking Saturday, August 1 2009.

• Added: Didion's husband dies and her daughter is hospitalized and then re-hospitalized.

Shelfari edited the description of The Year of Magical Thinking Friday, July 31 2009.

• 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.