The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

If uncontrollable sobbing is the order of the day, then this book is the perfect companion. Didion’s memoir traces her thought process during the year following her husband’s sudden death due to a heart attack. Their grown daughter was also in the hospital at the time, fighting death. This is an insightful glance into the grief process, and it is an honest account of the irrational but necessary progress of one’s thoughts after such a loss. Moreover, I found that Didion explored the way we think about the universe – the way we believe (or disbelieve) in ourselves, in God. This book definitely made an impression on me. Favorite Quote: “The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”