Welcome to Litsy!

I haven‘t posted for a long time. My life has been quite a journey for the past few years. In 2018, my husband of 27 years died. It took me a while to find myself after that. In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, I started dating and met the man who would save me. In 2021, I learned my son was ill. In November of 2021, I was married on a Saturday and my son would pass five days later. This beautiful life is not for the weak.

Beginning. This felt like a book about beginnings. But, more about the act of finding a "beginning" than actually beginning something. The search of a beginning being one pertaining to the process of beginning to process grief. How does one after all deal with the sudden absence of someone near and dear to oneself?......(continued in comments)

📖 Let Me Tell You What I Mean.
“I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writer‘s particular bias..”

📖 The Year of Magical Thinking.
“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehension that weakens the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life”

I did the audio version of this book. I found it to be very sad. Basically, this book tells the true story of a woman who unexpectedly lost her husband. It outlines how she‘s dealt with that loss over the course of a year. Her daughter also spends most of the story in the hospital, very I‘ll. It wasn‘t a bad book, just very depressing.

From the kitchen of Joan Didion how awesome! Can't wait to try it! Thank you Thank you @TheBookHippie for the recipe and the fantastic book 🥰. Apologies again for the late post ! #RecipeSwap @BennettBookworm

#weremember #joandiddion @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks @Eggs

My first Didion book, about the passing of her husband John Dunne. I had just lost my own husband. It was an impressive book, so I read several more of her books

#WeRemember #JoanDidion @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

#WeRemember Day 14: #JoanDidion‘s book is one of the few I hand-carried with me when my family and I moved from Singapore here to the UAE nearly 3 years ago. Here are the other titles I hand-carried with me along with photos of the 20-foot container holding all our belongings: https://wp.me/pDlzr-kTV

Sad and beautiful. A few parts were too literary for me with obscure references. But, I don‘t think people talk about the reality of death and grief enough. This book explores it deeply and superficially. Feelings and day to day life. Recommend, 4⭐️

Really glad I read this through the #Literati book club. A sobering work that addresses how we define a good life, and how we process a sudden death. Despite fame, success, and access to resources most don‘t have, nothing can prepare someone for tragedy at the dinner table. I‘m sure I‘ll come back to this one to help me through grief at some point. 4⭐️s

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” 😔

It‘s been a busy weekend so I‘m just now able to join in on the #FabulousFebruary #readathon. Starting this one today for one of the #Literati book clubs. I love the relatable way Didion wrote. Over the past few years, especially the past 2, I‘ve heard and experienced so many of these life-changing moments, making this a particularly relevant read.

Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

I waver between being envious & impatient with people who mourn. It feels like an indulgence not available to me. What Didion captured in this book that does resonate with me is how absurd it seems to attend to the mundane when a loved one lies dead in the dining room.

Deep sadness and grief are familiar to everyone, the feelings that everyone has experienced, but yet these are the same emotions that isolate us from others. Sad, intimate story about loss and isolation …
#nonfiction2022 #unplanned
#19822022 #2005
#booked2022 #writtenByJournalist

What a woman. What a writer. What a loss.

Probably the best book I have ever read.
#rip Joan Didion

#wishesandblessings #magic
“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”-Joan Didion
While trying to process illness & death in her own family, she wrote a powerful book that has lessons for us all on this topic.I love Didions writing , a tough but worthwhile read.

Ended up loving this! It was totally not what I thought it was going to be about.

Book 80

Still writing at 87, and as eloquent as always. Magical Thinking has a #mournful tone but in a different way than you‘ve ever imagined. So elegant. Written after her husband‘s death in 2003, but before her only child-her daughter-died a year later #springsentiments

#brokenheart #loveprevails 💔

Losing one‘s spouse is a special kind of broken-heartedness

Diving into 2021 with a bulky January total of 23 books. Ready to see where this year is going to take me. The tagged book was one of my Jan reads and I highly recommend. Fingers crossed I have time to mini review the books I go through for February!

#InspiredNewYear @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks @TheKidUpstairs
#Magical

This book felt meditative to read and cathartic to finish... (Mason rec)

An eloquent portrait of a life with, and the loss of — a #spouse 😔
#thankfulthoughts @Eggs

A great expression and explanation of mourning that describes how we make things make sense after losing loved ones. “Time is the school in which we learn” how to come to terms with what‘s left in life after death of family and loved ones. An instantly meaningful read for anyone alive.

🌿 Always! We must use our Constitutional voices-we have control over so little else...
🙏🏻 the health and physical ability to travel so I can be with my daughters, sons in laws, and grands 💗

#thankfulthursday @Cosmos_Moon

Joan Didion makes me want to smoke & drink a glass of expensive whiskey. She is a mood.
I enjoyed the mixture of biography, medical explanations, & thoughts on grief. But something about this just didn't work for me. Normally I don't mind name dropping or disconnectedness from wealthy people (we lost $50k because we bought a house before knowing we could sale one if our other houses so we ran away to Hawaii to regroup?) I found it annoying here.

“Life changes fast.Life changes in the instant.You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

#mortality #septembersenses

Tagged Book
Richard YATES
Young Frankenstein
YES
You Turn Me on I‘m a Radio - Joni Mithell

#ManicMonday #LetterY @JoScho

#Litsyatoz #letterY

I urge you not to read or listen to this memoir if you‘re struggling w/ tragedy or depression, the opposite of what I expected from the title (I got it because of the title). This is about the deaths of the author‘s husband & only daughter close in time to one another, & how she dealt with it. She accurately describes how we (or at least I) tend to magically think that if we just do something, a different result will occur. ⬇️

#kindledeals #kindledeal #ebooksale

This week‘s op shop finds on the way home from work.

Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant.

Joan Didion writes like a poet. Her prose is undeniably captivating. I've only ever read excerpts from her work before and I just had to read more. This book is about marriage and children, but mostly grief and how living life works when unthinkable things happen.

Didion didn't necessarily mean anything good with the word “Magical“ and I love that. She turned the meaning of the word upside down- it is something unnatural, mystifying

Didion is such a cool headed, logical and independent thinker. She investigated and reasoned her emotions dealing with loss and grief, like pealing an onion, to understand grief, and to watch what‘s happening to her what‘s changing inside her, above herself. And she shows you her process of pealing this onion in front you, and it makes you cry too....

What a real, beautiful, sharp, honest writing about love. I LOVE Joan Didion!

I had to actively accept and move past the privilege that was so casually oozing between the lines of this text - connections to Ivy-league educated medical professionals, not considering herself of any particular good luck, etc. But having dealt with the grief of losing one parent and managing the serious illness of the other, there were striking moments of relatability in her prose. And it can help to hear how someone else processes it all.

All year I have been keeping time by last years calendar. What were we doing this day last year? ... I realized today for the first time, my memory of today a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. ... John did not see this day a year ago.

It‘s May! 🌸 🌱 My plant is growing out new leaf, and I‘m starting out a new book!

#7days7books Day 1: 7 books that have left a deep impression and changed me.

Great #audiorun this morning around the Rose Bowl! I'm staying in Pasadena with my friend's brother for a couple days as my friend and I drive down to a training event in San Diego. This book is so heartbreaking but so lovely. I'm glad #NewYearWhoDis prompted me to pick up my first Joan Didion! @Emilymdxn @monalyisha

Joan‘s eloquent memoir of losing her husband resonated with me...

#memoir

#gratefulreads

@OriginalCyn620
@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Amazon thinks all I read now is fantasy, I think I need to break it up 😂

I‘ve had a very busy month in August traveling to three different countries and being run off my feet so I did a good amount of reading! Some really great books - Ducks Newburyport, To Be Taught If Fortunate and Year of Magical Thinking were all 10/10 perfect books so it‘s been a brilliant month overall for books

Although this technically follows a linear timeline starting with the night her husband dies, Didion writes it in spirals, returning over and over to thoughts and memories she had at the time. In doing so, she captures the mental life of grief in exacting detail--all the guilt, detachment, and fantasies that the death is somehow temporary. That Didion was able to write with such insight and clarity about this experience is pretty incredible.

Definitely a pick of the year for me. This meditation on grief and its impact on your thought processes and your whole life was so important and special I‘m going to buy a physical copy so I‘ll have it when my mental health is bad next. I saw so much of my own way of thinking in Joan Didion‘s struggles following the death of her husband and I see myself rereading this over and over again.

Starting this today. Eve though it‘s for school I‘m excited to start it. Hope it goes well!