It wasn’t my intention to read three memoirs dealing with death and loss in January this year. The death of a husband, a mother and a father. All by very different people and written in quite different styles but all quite depressing.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later – the night before New Year’s Eve – the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”
I have always liked the writing of Joan Didion. Just a perfect mix of dry, matter-of-fact, yet still emotional writing. But this one was special. The essays I had read before were about other people, politics and yes, also relationships with friends, but family is different.
Didion conveyed the feeling of loss in a way that only an author of this magnitude could. Weaving together memories from different times, finding the words to express loss matter of factly, abstractly and bursting with emotions – all at the same time. A heartbreaking journey that is hard to sum up.
I am lucky that I have not yet had that kind of loss in my life, but I would imagine that a year detached from a great loss, this book would be a soothing read.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Michelle Zauner tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band — and meeting the man who would become her husband — her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
A friend of mine gave me this book. I would probably never have read it otherwise, as I remembered it too clearly from when it was really popular.
It was an interesting contrast to Didion’s book. Zauner wrote the book in her very early thirties, while Didion was 70 writing hers. Didion focused on ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ after the loss of her husband, with memories of other times, interjected when they came to her. Zauner’s book was more of a classical chronological memoir, with the cornerstones of memories lying in the Korean dishes her mother used to make. I can relate to food being a big part of one’s childhood and memories of a mother. Though my mother hated cooking, she worked in a restaurant and my life is filled with food-related memories.
The book was well-written, a sad but heat-warming read and made me yearn for a good Korean restaurant.
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa by Peter Godwin
After his father’s heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe’s dramatic spiral downwards into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years. Then Godwin discovered a shocking family secret that helped explain their loyalty. Africa was his father’s sanctuary from another identity, another world.
I had read and loved Godwin’s first book Mukiwa. It was a fascinating look into a life I could hardly even imagine. And it was painful. As I wrote in that post, I had to put the book down every now and then and gather myself to continue. But that was nothing compared to this one.
Godwin managed to top this year’s two first books by adding to the death of his father the total horror of Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship in Zimbabwe – brutal murders of white farmers, torture and starvation. And to make it even worse, descriptions of the Holocaust.
I know, I know, there is much good in this world – a lot of people giving their all to make this world better. But, damn it, people can be just unbelievably horrible. And there is no one to stop them once they have enough power. Godwin’s book was published in 2006, people knew what was going on and Mugabe still clung to power until 2017. Of course, reading it in 2024, Ukraine was on my mind – two years of death and destruction just happening before our eyes and no one to stop it. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe has a new president – Emmerson Mnangagwa – who in July 2023 voiced support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
According to a 2022 report on democracy from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at the University of Gothenburg, 70 per cent of the world’s population now live in dictatorships. Basically half the world is involved in some armed conflict.
I am sorry this post got so depressing, but losing loved ones is hard, terrible people cling to power and destroy lives everywhere, and there is just no bright side to look at. But sometimes it’s also good to read about these things to get some perspective and try to appreciate the people you love.
And no matter how hard it was to read some passages from Godwin’s book, it was wonderfully written and engaging. I can very much recommend it, together with his first book Mukiwa. And I will certainly read the next one.
Now go on – make some lasting memories with the people you love! So that both of you have some great stories for your memoirs.