Sunday Book Review Plus – Bonus Documentary Recap on Joan Didion – The Year of Magical Thinking

Welcome to my Sunday Book Review with an added bonus. Today I’m going to review Joan Didion’s book – The Year of Magical Thinking. But before I share my book review, I’m going to share an overview of the 2017 Documentary currently on Netflix – Joan Didion – The Center Will Not Hold, where 86 year old, literary icon, Joan, reflects on her intimate stories from her writing career and struggles, and her forty year marriage to author John Gregory Dunne, brother to author Dominick Dunne. The documentary was directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.

 

My 5 Star Review Documentary Review:

 

Joan Didion was born December 5, 1934 in Sacremento, California. She’s an American novelist and essayist and screenwriter. Joan is known for her incisive depictions of social unrest. Joan says she began writing at the age of five and was a shy ‘bookish’ girl. She never considered herself a real writer until her first published book. Joan struggled with social anxiety and took up acting and public speaking to help ease her anxieties. As a young teen, she spent much of her time typing out books by Ernest Hemingway so she could learn how sentence structure worked. Joan had a sordid childhood as her dad was in the army during WWII, with moving a lot she didn’t attend school regularly until returning back to Sacremento in 1944.

 

After watching the documentary and learning about the demises of both her husband and her daughter Quintana, my heart went out to Joan and I was compelled to read her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, because she wrote it after John’s death. It was first published in 2005. In the documentary, Joan’s publicist talks about how he urged Joan to write her novel published in 2012 – Blue Nights, for both, John and Quintana.

 

John and Joan met in New York City when Joan won a poetry contest at her senior year in Berkeley for her essay, Prix de Paris, and the prize landed her a job as research assistant at Vogue. John wrote for Time Magazine at the time.

 

They bounced ideas off one another, each wrote their own books and essays, but they collaborated on screenplays together – Needle Park (1971 with Al Pacino) and A Star is Born (1976 Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. Joan’s logline for Needle Park – “Romeo and Juliette as junkies.

 

In this documentary, we get a deep inside look at this author from her beginnings as a journalist writing hard stories, Joan would say that she writes about disorder because she’d then find the situation”less scary”. She wasn’t happy with the way some of her books were portrayed for movies, such as, Book of Common Prayer, complaining her characters were totally different than what she’d written.

 

Joan admits that much of what she writes contained pieces of her. Her interests in writing were mostly about stories of humanity and the bad things going on in the world. Her visit to El Salvador prompted her to write political stories and essays, and an eventual book called El Salvador. She talks about the lie of the Central Park 7 – propaganda spurred falsely in the accusation of the rape of a jogger in Central Park, N.Y. and on VP Dick Cheney, “Bully of the Bush war,” “He took the lemons, made lemonade, spilled, and made someone else cleanup.”

 

John and Joan kept a low profile in the celeb world. They adopted their daughter Quintana at birth. When Quintana was asked what kind of mom Joan was, she replied, “Okay, mostly remote.” Joan began questioning how parents are sometimes on auto-pilot and don’t realize child neglect.

 

In 2003, Quintana took ill and was rushed to hospital when she went into septic shock resulting from pneumonia, which turned worse and ultimately left her in a coma at the time of John’s death. John and Joan had just come home from visiting Quintana in hospital on December 30, 2003, and they were sick with worry about their daughter. Joan made dinner, the two sat down to eat when John had a massive, fatal heart attack. Later, looking in her husband’s closet with a friend to pack up his clothes, Joan said, “What if he comes back?” That was clearly a grief statement because I could so identify with not wanting to let go. After she wrote The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan said it was the hardest book to write, but had to write it to get through. I totally get that. She told herself that after writing the book she would learn to let go. This woman lost the love of her life while their daughter lay in a coma.

 

Months after Quintana’s recovery, she fell and hit her head, suffering a massive hematoma and resulting in six hours of brain surgery. As Quintana was recovering her major illnesses in 2004, she came down with Pancreatitis in 2005, and ultimately died from it in August 2005 at age 39. Didion wrote Blue Nights in 2011 for Quintana. That woman was broken.

 

Joan was/is a tiny woman, and after losing her family, her wonderful friends stepped up to take care of her and made sure she ate at her already weight of 75 pounds. Joan then wrote the play for the book The Year of Magical Thinking, which starred Vanessa Redgrave, in the nonfictional soliloquy.

 

Joan wrote Blue Nights after the play, about Quintana – a book she said she didn’t want to write. On her life when asked if she had regrets about things, she said, “The failure to plan for misfortune,” her guilt of failing as a mother.

 

In 2005 Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and became a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award.  She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, The Magical Year of Thinking. In 2015, President Obama awarded Joan with the Mastery of Style in Writing Award for exploring the culture around us and exposing the depths of sorrow and for her ‘startling honesty’.

 

 

Poignant Quotes:

 

“Everyone has moved on except the one left grieving.”

 

“See enough and write it down.”

 

“A journal – a forgotten account paid with interest.”

 

“Remember what it is to be me, that’s always the point.”

 

 

 

 

I recently finished reading Joan’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking. After seeing the documentary and having only read one other of Joan’s books, I felt compelled to read.

 

 

 

 

Blurb:

 

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

 

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.”

 

 

My 5 Star Review:

 

An accounting of love and loss. In this often, heartwrenching book, Joan Didion champions her once simple writing life alone, without her husband, best friend and consultant on all her writing. Joan reminisces on her life and writing with her husband John, always with her – writing, walking, traveling, filming – they did everything together, despite them both being individual writers, with the exception of a few collaborations.

 

Joan takes us through her life in vignettes as she shares memories of incidence on vacations the family took together, the circles of people they traveled with, their routines, when they adopted Quintana, motherhood, and mistakes. But most poignantly, Joan focuses on the time of John’s death, the surreal moments, the most insignificant things becoming big things, the most minutest details overlooked while she was living numb are being realized in this story. She begins her story with the the eve her and John went to visit Quintana in hospital, while she was in an induced coma. They were both worried sick about their daughter. Joan makes dinner, they sit down to eat and John has a fatal heart attack right in front of her on December 30, 2003. Her details are precise. She talks about her different kinds of grief, comparing the variation in grief between losing her parents, to how different her grief felt when John died. Joan shares what it was like waking up the next morning alone. She’ll take you right into her realizations. So identifiable for anyone who has ever deeply loved and lost. I know much of what Joan speaks, like not even remembering if we ate or not, mostly not. It’s a numbness that takes over to break the impact of the shock.

 

Joan bares herself with raw honesty on what grief leaves on someone, the stages of steps involved until reaching acceptance, but I wonder how many ever get there. Joan shares how she came to decisions about giving her loved one’s clothes away, as Joan in her denial stage held hope he may come back. Joan discusses her concern of having to break the news to Quintana about her father’s death, after she awakes from a long coma. Joan shares her fears about her daughter getting sick again overshadowing her grief – “Until now, I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened, Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.”

 

Imagine trying to stay sane!

 

Joan Didion is an iconic writer. As a journalist, she followed stories of humanity, out in the field. She said it was easier to deal with war if she could see it. She’s a tiny frail woman who can barely move her hands now at age 86, but that doesn’t stop her from still using them to articulate what she speaks. She’s lived through hell and back TWICE, first losing the love of her life, then her daughter. I can only imagine the amount of courage it took to write about such pain. It’s not surprising this Warrior Woman has won so many awards. I was drawn to this book after watching a documentary about her, The Center Will Not Hold on Netflix after my own husband’s passing, and I would recommend this book to anyone, especially those who have loved and lost.

 

 

Poignant Quotes that resonate:

 

“Life changes fast.

 

Life changes in the instant.

 

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

 

The question of self-pity.”

 

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”

 

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death.”

 

“Marriage is memory, marriage is time.”

 

“For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others.”

 

“I have trouble thinking of myself as a widow. I remember hesitating the first time I had to check that box on the ‘marital status’ part of a form.”

 

“I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.”

 

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”

 

“I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account.”

 

 

©DGKaye2021

 

Sunday Movie Review – I am Greta – #Documentary – #ClimateChange

Welcome to my Sunday Movie Review, where I share a review for movies I’ve watched that I feel deserve attention.

HBO special- I am Greta – the journey to becoming Greta Thunberg, documented. I watched this documentary two weeks ago when I came across it as I searched my saved lists of docs to watch. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to elaborate on who Greta Thunberg is – the teenager from Sweden who has Asperger’s and created a global movement for climate change. This doc is the story of how Greta’s movement gained world attention, from its inception to the global stage her protests grew into.

 

My 5 Star Review:

The documentary begins with 15 year old Greta’s concern with the state of the planet and climate change, and nobody seemed to care.

One lone girl, Greta, sits on the pavement in front of parliament on a Friday afternoon in Sweden with a protest sign, handing out papers she’s written about the danger in the world of climate change globally. Greta has Asperger’s and explains how she has no friends, often doesn’t like to speak, and her best supporter is her father, who tells us Greta has a photogenic memory and that Greta began pulling out plugs and turning off lights at a young age to conserve energy.

Greta begins gaining national attention when her Friday protests grew bigger as her movement eventually reached global attention. She’s eventually invited to speak at the UN. As her cause and popularity get noticed around the globe, the Friday ‘no school’ climate protests catch on around the world where thousands of kids join the fight.

“I don’t care about being popular, I care about climate justice and the living planet,” Greta laments. “It will be over soon and nobody will recognize me,” Greta says after a big televised conference. But nobody did forget Greta. The press began to follow her closely. Greta gained worldwide attention and supporters who said they cannot let her do the fight on her own, as she raises awareness everywhere she travels, thousands of teens join the fight globally. The official hashtag for Greta’s mission becomes #FridaysfortheFuture. This girl’s dedication, despite the flack and obstacles she encountered, is and was relentless. I cried my eyes out on so many levels as I took in the magnitude of her plight.

Greta stands true to her beliefs. As her mission is to cut emissions and pollutions – Greta’s movement was expanding globally and she had to begin making appearances to support her movement and embolden her supporters. But Greta would not fly in airplanes, it went against everything she fights for, but she takes the long road and becomes a globetrotter to show up for the cause and protests, as her father staunchly supports her and accompanies her on her missions taking long train journeys throughout Europe. President Macron invites her to Paris, in a televised conversation, he shares the importance of rich countries needing to help lead the way to climate change. Macron: “How do you manage school doing this?”  Greta tells Macron she’s a nerd who makes up for missed school at home.

As Greta gets invited to more European climate change summits where her fight grows in recognition, she begins to question why she is getting so popular, “I honestly don’t understand why I get invited, so they can be spotlighted to look like they care as if they’re doing something. They’re doing nothing.”

Greta is challenged with her Asperger’s and her struggle for wanting to be left alone and her need to spread the message. Preferring to be alone, Greta must conquer her struggle while rallying up a charge and taking up those invitations requesting her presence. Her frustration often requires alone time. “Everyone promises to do things better, but they never do. Pretending feels kind of fake. What matters is emissions must be reduced and has to start now.”

Greta visits the Pope who encourages her to keep up the fight as thousands gathered outside the Vatican shouting Greta’s name, chanting for ‘Greta to save the planet.’ But of course, with glory also comes the bad press and negativity from some of the more ‘authoritarian-type’ world leaders who don’t seem to be interested in saving the planet. Putin thinks it’s a bogus cause, Trump makes fun of her, Balsenaro cuts her up, and her own government says she’s just a kid, in fact, most world leaders interviewed and asked about her, feel the same way – except Macron.

Then come the death threats as social media starts picking on her. But Greta said she didn’t care. “Humanity sees nature as this giant bag of candy, that we can just take what we want. But one day nature will strike back, I don’t know exactly how but there are heatwaves and floods and fires.”

She’s invited to the EU parliament to speak among hundreds of diplomats and gives a well researched speech on the devastation of climate change, through tears she shoots her words and finally gets a standing ovation. Greta is asked, “Why did you cry during your speech?”

Greta: “Animals and people are dying.”

“Why do some think of you as a radical baby who can’t really do anything,” one politician asked her.

“Sometimes I feel like the microphone isn’t on. Is it on? Because I’m begining to wonder. You lied to us and gave us false hope. Nobody is talking about it, nothing has changed. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.”

Greta gets invited to speak in the USA at the UN climate summit in New York. “Since I don’t fly because of the enormous climate impact on aviation, it’s going to be a challenge.” It took two weeks for Greta and her dad to sail to America.

“I don’t want to be a person who says one thing and does something else. I don’t want to fly across the world because it’s easier that way,” Greta says as as she and her dad prepare the journey across the Atlantic from Plymouth, England. Droves of people wish them well as they sail off on rough waters in a sailboat. Greta encounters both seasickness and homesickness on the trek. “I don’t want to have to do all this. It’s too much for me, around the clock. I know that it’s important and what’s at stake. But it’s such a responsibility. I should be back in school, not the other side of the ocean.” Greta writes and dictates during the journey, questioning herself if her cause has taken her too far out of her comfort zone, in awe that her meager beginnings of being a solitaire young girl who began her lone protest sitting in front of her parliament building with a sign, one Friday afternoon.

The sails are up as Greta and her dad reach New York harbor. The crowds of people awaiting her were magnificent in size and chant. Greta shouts to the people, “We are dependent on each other to survive. If you see a threat it’s your responsibility to sound the alarm. I feel like this is my responsibility in a way.”

Greta goes to the 2019 climate summit in New York where world leaders congregrate. Her speech begins, “My name is Greta Thunberg, and I want you to panic. The world is waking up and change is coming whether you like it or not.” The speech ends with, “If you deal with problems in time instead of waiting, your problems won’t get as big because if you do that, you come out on the other side and there it’s better.”

Greta planted the seeds of hope and still runs her protests every Friday since 2018. Since that time, over 200 activists have been murdered for fighting for clean air. In 2019, more than seven million people joined Greta’s protest. Despite Greta’s efforts, the world is still not on track yet to meet the requirements for the Paris Climate Accord.

 

“We will not stop until we’re done” ~ Greta Thunberg

 

Below is the powerful trailer for ‘I am Greta’

 

 

If you’d like to visit Greta’s website for Climate Change Europe: https://climateemergencyeu.org/

 

©DGKaye2020

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