One of them is Joan Didion. She was a Vogue editor back in the 1950s, and later became a journalist and author who wrote many books. This book about loss is her representative work. To briefly introduce it, Joan Didion’s husband suddenly passed away, and then, about two years later, another death occurred. She wrote about the feelings she experienced after going through that loss. What left a deep impression on me was, I think, the very first page: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” The idea of self-pity really resonated with me. In a way, she had been living a happy, ordinary life, and then one day he suddenly died. But she couldn’t really take in that her family was gone, so she kept thinking things like, “He must be alive somewhere, right?” And since people inevitably looked at her with great pity, her own defenses would come up, too. It wasn’t an emotion I’d experienced myself, and it was such a heavy feeling, but somehow I felt it very deeply.
