So, I had to write a response to a book published in the past ten years that is in the non-fiction genre and I wrote about Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Here it is:
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I’m not sure if it is because of my mother’s avid reading habits or my early devotion to (read: obsession with) the Harry Potter series but, at twenty-one years old, I identify myself as a voracious reader. I’ve read the classics, I’ve read the satires, and I’ve even fallen into the fad books raved about on the Internet, much to my own intellectual detriment. Most of the time, I find myself immersed in pieces of literature that lead me out of my own life and into ones that are much more complex than my own. Rarely do I find myself with a renewed sense of life or thought, post-turning of that final page. However, rarely does not mean “never” and when I finished Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, I found myself swaddled in the clichéd cloth of a life-changing epiphany.
If you’ve never read the piece, it follows the emotional journey of Didion after her writer husband, John Dunne, suddenly dies of a heart attack at the dinner table after visiting their only daughter, Quintana Roo, in the hospital. Quintana was battling septic shock at the time. The entire work is not particularly long but as a first-hand account of dealing with grief, it is an exhaustingly beautiful novel to finish. At the end, I found myself drained, tired, and suddenly hyperaware of what it means to live.
The Young and Broke Life 