After my friend called to tell me about it, I listened to Joan Didion interviewed on the radio yesterday morning. I had just finished her new book, Blue Nights, a week ago. Just Didion's voice alone is so powerfully evocative. And the subject is everyone's nightmare - the death of a child - in this case her grown daughter and only child. As with her writing, the discussion was intricately complex. There was medical confusion, insufficient information, the echoes of abandonment feelings because her daughter was adopted, the issue of mental illness, Didion's husband's sudden death during the process and much more. Didion honors the complexity, and also her feelings of being inadequate, of not recognizing signs sooner, of not understanding children of adoption.
You don't necessarily entirely like Didion in this account, but in the same way you don't like yourself when you look back. There is generosity, there are selfish interests, there is love, there is embarrassment. We get to see Didion whole, and in that process, accept perhaps a little more of ourselves. Everybody's guilty, everybody's innocent. And grief has no closure.
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