I’ve read only The Year of Magical Thinking, which I read shortly after my husband’s death earlier this year. It was absolutely the right thing for me at the time. Joan Didion’s unsparing narrative of her first year as a widow was alarming, comforting, scary, and ultimately wise. “In the end you have to go with the change” stays with me. Still working on going with the change, knowing millions before me have done it.
She and her husband co-wrote the script for The Panic in Needle Park, starring a young Al Pacino, a movie that is hard to watch but that I consider brilliant. I’ve seen it four times and will watch it once more before I send it back to Netflix to be de-listed into oblivion.
If there is such a thing as peace after death, if there is anything at all, I wish it for Joan Didion.