A Pairing
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Didion's memoir and Tartt's novel both refuse the therapeutic arc of grief. Didion explores the mind's failure to accept what it knows, providing lived-in examples of magical thinking that are far more effective than abstractions. Tartt traces what happens when loss becomes the unprocessed engine of an entire life. Both are deeply interested in objects as anchors for the dead. Neither book argues that holding on is good or that letting go is necessary. They are the most relatable and honest pieces of writing on grief I have encountered.
A Passage
View All →"I got a job checking facts at a science magazine. Fun facts the called them. 'The connected fibers in a human brain, extended, would wrap around the Earth forty times.' Horrible, I wrote in the margin, but they put it through anyway."
Shelves
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Matt's Recommended Fiction
Matt's Recommended Nonfiction
Metaphors We Live By
1980
The Histories
430 BC
Post-History
1993
Limits To Medicine
1974
Black Elk Speaks
1932
The True Believer
1951
Good People in an Evil Time
2004
The War for Kindness
2019
Illness as Metaphor
1978
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
1962
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
2019
Dystopia
We
1924
1984
1949
Brave New World
1932
Player Piano
1952
Blindness
1995
Fahrenheit 451
1953
The Iron Heel
1908
The Trial
1925
Lord of the World
1907
The Giver
1993
Kallocain
1940
Erewhon
1872
Looking Backward
1888
The Road
2006
Notes from Underground
1864
The Hunger Games
2008
It Can't Happen Here
1935
Darkness at Noon
1940