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This amazing memoir documents the author's life after a hectic period of time. In December, 2003 her adult daughter contracted a near-fatal toxaemia and while she was in hospital in a coma, Didion's husband had a massive coronary and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. In the following days and months, Didion went through a process that many people will go through at some stage in their lives, but that no one likes to think about.
The credible thing about this book is that it explores emotions immediately following her husband's death as well as during her daughter's first and subsequent admissions to hospital over the time. Didion was obviously imminently capable of keeping track of immediate emotions as she was a writer already; used to scribbling things down for more exploration at a later date.
This book for me was characterised firstly by Didion's bluntness and dedication to her subject of shock, grief and recovery. This often seems to appear as a lack of feeling or sensitivity but it does demonstrate a coping strategy that many use in times of grief. The feelings in this book are also expressed in a useful way which corresponds well with the natural process of grief. Tragically, just as Didion began to rebuild her life and look to the future, her daughter collapsed and was taken to hospital presumed brain dead - she recovered amazingly, but Didion found herself unable to grieve in the months while she sat by her daughter's bedside trying to accept that there was more to lose.
This is an amazing book both about the experience of death and the processes of grief involved with it. I would highly recommend it to anyone who has lost someone close or anyone interested in how the mind copes with such a loss.
This spectacular book is the first I have read by Atkinson and hopefully won't be the last, it tells the story of a Private Investigator looking into what at face value look like three completely different cases, all involving suspicious disappearances or deaths. These are outlined in case histories at the beginning of the book.
As the story grows the character of Jackson Brodie (the PI) is developed slowly and his past leading to his current profession becomes clearer and his rather gruff manner also begins to make a lot more sense. The other characters that appear throughout the book are developed piece by piece as if putting together an extremely complex puzzle. Two sisters looking into the never solved loss of their younger sister live out their grief in different ways, a man who has lost his favourite daughter tries to come to grips with why she was killed and a woman builds a new life for herself hiding a secret that no one can ever know.
The thing I loved about this book was the multiple storylines, every one explored fully and every one with its own twists and turns. The character development as mentioned before throughout the book was also most impressive and well placed. It came to a finish weaving all three cases together and shows the reader the complexities of loss and the terrible burden of guilt.
Would highly recommend this to anyone.
I saw this book while at the library one day and was curious to read it. I have read Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by the same author, pretty much my favourite memoir of all that I have read. This is her first and so far only fictional novel release so I didn't know if it would be good or bad, luckily for me I got a pleasant surprise.
The novel details a family which has every chance of falling apart after a father kills himself, his wife must come to terms with the incident, his 12 year old son has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years and his 6 year old daughter is desperately trying to hold her family together. It is written in their three different viewpoints and Hornbacher manages to capture both their ages and their statuses within the family beautifully. At first I thought it was going to be a really depressing book but it really said a lot about the feeling of grief, the disbelief, the sadness, the falling and the picking back up again.
Hornbacher also seems to understand mental illness very well, I was to find out it is actually because she suffers from bipolar disorder herself. She didn't also do what a lot of memoir-switched-fiction writers do: she didn't include her own experiences so much that the book was sort of like a biography even if it wasn't one but still managed to make the family realistic and heartwarming. Her writing reminds me of a cross between Margaret Atwood and someone else, not quite as literary as Atwood I suppose but beautiful all the same.
I give this book my highest 5-star recommendation.
