The Year of Magical Thinking

If I got nothing else out of reading my first full Didion, it was worth it to see her expert handling of sentence structure. Be warned, it is not for the faint of attention span (though I did get away w/ breezing through a lot of the book) because you will get lost in the labyrinthine syntax. This is the kind of stuff writing instructors warn against because of the risk of creating a...more

If I got nothing else out of reading my first full Didion, it was worth it to see her expert handling of sentence structure. Be warned, it is not for the faint of attention span (though I did get away w/ breezing through a lot of the book) because you will get lost in the labyrinthine syntax. This is the kind of stuff writing instructors warn against because of the risk of creating a confusing, convoluted mess, but it's no problem for Didion. But I didn't get nothing else. I also admire her combination of contemporary vernacular w/ artistic symbolism, which though not mutually exclusive are hard to pin down. I'm a victim of acute, debilitating nostalgia, so my favorite example of this is Didion's "vortex" of moments that force her to relive/reevaluate her husband's living moments. Through these, and her daughter's illness, she attempts to buck some conventional wisdoms, sure that there are things we can't really understand until they happen. This is very true, so true that her task is even more difficult than vernacular symbolism, so maybe she can't be blamed for not entirely succeeding here. Or maybe she can. The jury's out. Had this been written by someone else, all the name dropping probably would have seemed pretentious, I'm still unsure, but personally it helped me to learn more about Didion. And on a trivial level, shout-outs to Sacramento are always good for extra credit. As is girl power.   hide