#The Year of Magical Thinking

[flowerytale]

Joan Didion, from The Year of Magical Thinking

[bypatia]

book recs no one asked for: always coming home by ursula k le guin, why we swim by bonnie tsui, a thousand splendid suns by khaled hosseini, if you want feminist soul-changing, hopepunk, touches the veil of life reads, and educated by tara westover, all about love by bell hooks, the year of magical thinking by joan didion if you want real, visceral takes on love, grief, and being the master of your own fate, bye

[frenchnewwaves]

Joan Didion's Packing List:

TO PACK AND WEAR: 2 skirts 2 jerseys or leotards 1 pullover sweater 2 pair shoes stockings bra nightgown, robe, slippers cigarettes bourbon bag with: shampoo toothbrush and paste Basis soap, razor deodorant aspirin prescriptions Tampax face cream powder baby oil

TO CARRY: mohair throw typewriter 2 legal pads and pens files house key

“This is a list which was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do. Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture. Notice the mohair throw for trunk-line flights (i.e. no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same motel room. Notice the typewriter for the airport, coming home: the idea was to turn in the Hertz car, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.”

—Joan Didion, “The White Album” (1979)

[animula-vagula-blandula]

-L'anno del pensiero magico, Joan Didion

[dk-thrive]

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage; February 13, 2007)

[deadpoetsloverr]

Joan Didion, The year of magical thinking

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don't just 'get over' it; you learn to carry it with you. Time passes, the ache lessens, but it is always there, like a dull bruise on your heart. And there will be days when you wake up and feel like the wound has reopened, that everything you have healed will unravel again, just by the touch of a memory. But you carry on, holding on to the love you had, even if it’s just to remember that once, you were loved."

— From "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion

(Philosophy Insights)

[lets-get-lit]

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

[mightbeadaredevil]

what’s in my bag

[unsureofu]

mourning eludes me. where to start?

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[greengirllover]

[catmint1]

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

[frenchnewwaves]

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”

On Self-Respect by Joan Didion

[ripeteeth]

"As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself."

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

[sunriserollercoaster]

the year of magical thinking, joan didion