The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their

own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.

myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen ...

Everything he had done, he said, was worthless. I still tried to dismiss it. This might not be normal, I told myself, but neither was the condition in which we had just left Quintana. He said that the novel was worthless.

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.

You’re safe. I’m here.

I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events.

Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

verbs from the nouns. Bahasa was a language,

I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.