Heartbreak in a jar, pretty much. I'm not giving the game away if I tell you (since I'm pretty sure it says this in the blurb) that this is Joan Didion's account of the year following the day when, as her daughter lie in a coma, her husband died. Smack down.Joan and her husband John appear to be some kind of Gatsby-esque caricatures - writers, living in New York, with tales of having flown between cities to have dinner together when working apart - and there's enough socialite name-dropping in this book to put some glossy magazines to shame, but this is one of the most tender accounts of a marriage I have ever read.
We can't know what it is to grieve for and mourn a spouse without having done it - a sentiment Didion herself expresses, saying:
"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death."
- but I strongly suspect this is the most lucid, illuminating account of such an experience I'm likely to come across.
Cheerfully, her latest book, Blue Nights, was written following the death of her daughter, in case you're interested in a double whammy. I, for one, am going to have to let that one alone for a while...
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