UNICORN PORN FOR ALL

This is the second book my girlfriend has recommended to me about people whose spouses die. So...

There's a clinical feel about this book. Not accidentally: Didion goes out of her way to cite research on the effects of grief. She analyzes it. You can feel her standing back from it, trying desperately to understand it. It lacks the emotional punch of (the other depressing-ass book my girlfriend convinced me to read) [b:About Alice,|95961|About Alice|Calvin Trillin|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320388384s/95961.jpg|1168959] and it does that on purpose. This is how Joan Didion works, I guess: she tries to dig in and understand. She's "a cool customer," as a hospital worker describes her at the moment of her husband's death. "What," she wonders, "would an uncool customer be allowed to do?"

I told Jo that I connected with About Alice more, emotionally; this seemed more like a description. Someone said here on Goodreads that it was nice to hear a story about a real passionate love affair, and I was surprised; that's not the story I read. It may have been passionate, but that's not in this book. There's not one mention of a passionate moment. Moments of support, absolutely, and of friendship, but never passion. At times I felt like the tragedy here wasn't the loss of love, but the loss of habit.

But habit is life, and what Didion is trying to describe is the loss of her life as she knew it. Jo said it nicely: About Alice is about love, she said; Year of Magical Thinking is about loss.

I call I die first so I don't have to go through this. It sounds like a bummer.