16 Aug 2007, ST
By Hong Xinyi
BY HER own admission, when American writer Joan Didion sat down to pen The Year Of Magical Thinking in 2003, she had nothing else in mind besides the urgent need to make sense of her grief.
On Christmas night that year, her only child, Quintana, was hospitalised for pneumonia and septic shock. Five days later, her husband, writer John Dunne, died of a heart attack during dinner. Her daughter would die less than two years later.
Didion, an iconic journalist, essayist and novelist, made her mark with her sparely detached and steadfastly lucid prose.
In seminal books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), she captured the texture of American culture and politics with a distinct, melancholy elegance.
The Year Of Magical Thinking, an account of how she coped in the days following the death of her husband, won the National Book Award in 2005. Earlier this year, it was adapted into a Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave. Below is an excerpt from the book:
YOU sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it'.
We understand the aversion most of us have to 'dwelling on it'. Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.
'A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,' Philippe Aries wrote to the point of the aversion in Western Attitudes Towards Death. 'But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.'
We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, the even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died; this attempt at corrective thinking serves only to plunge us deeper into the self-regarding deep. (Why didn't I see that, why am I so selfish.)
The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: Self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self-pity is thumb-sucking, self-pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow.
Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given.
'Our worst enemy,' Helen Keller called it. I never saw a wild thing/sorry for itself, D.H. Lawrence wrote, in a much-quoted four-line homily that turns out on examination to be free of any but tendentious meaning. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough/without ever having felt sorry for itself.
This may be what Lawrence (or we) would prefer to believe about wild things, but consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate. Consider those geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and die.
In fact, the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves. Husbands walk out, wives walk out, divorces happen, but these husbands and wives leave behind them webs of intact associations, however acrimonious.
Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life - both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections - have all vanished.
# The Year Of Magical Thinking ($19.26 with GST) is available at Books Kinokuniya.
# Books For The Soul is a weekly column that highlights books which move, comfort or inspire.
By Hong Xinyi
BY HER own admission, when American writer Joan Didion sat down to pen The Year Of Magical Thinking in 2003, she had nothing else in mind besides the urgent need to make sense of her grief.
On Christmas night that year, her only child, Quintana, was hospitalised for pneumonia and septic shock. Five days later, her husband, writer John Dunne, died of a heart attack during dinner. Her daughter would die less than two years later.
Didion, an iconic journalist, essayist and novelist, made her mark with her sparely detached and steadfastly lucid prose.
In seminal books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), she captured the texture of American culture and politics with a distinct, melancholy elegance.
The Year Of Magical Thinking, an account of how she coped in the days following the death of her husband, won the National Book Award in 2005. Earlier this year, it was adapted into a Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave. Below is an excerpt from the book:
YOU sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it'.
We understand the aversion most of us have to 'dwelling on it'. Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.
'A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,' Philippe Aries wrote to the point of the aversion in Western Attitudes Towards Death. 'But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.'
We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, the even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died; this attempt at corrective thinking serves only to plunge us deeper into the self-regarding deep. (Why didn't I see that, why am I so selfish.)
The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: Self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self-pity is thumb-sucking, self-pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow.
Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given.
'Our worst enemy,' Helen Keller called it. I never saw a wild thing/sorry for itself, D.H. Lawrence wrote, in a much-quoted four-line homily that turns out on examination to be free of any but tendentious meaning. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough/without ever having felt sorry for itself.
This may be what Lawrence (or we) would prefer to believe about wild things, but consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate. Consider those geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and die.
In fact, the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves. Husbands walk out, wives walk out, divorces happen, but these husbands and wives leave behind them webs of intact associations, however acrimonious.
Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life - both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections - have all vanished.
# The Year Of Magical Thinking ($19.26 with GST) is available at Books Kinokuniya.
# Books For The Soul is a weekly column that highlights books which move, comfort or inspire.
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