The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) (edit title/settings)

Jennifer 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."

Jennifer 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.