To-day I finished reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Precipitated by the heart attack which abruptly claimed the life of her husband of 39 years, John Gregory Dunne, at roughly 10 p.m. on 30 December 2003, it is a meditation on grief. It is a log of Didion’s thoughts and musings in the first hours, first days, first weeks, first months as a widow, newly shorn of her other half, and it gained acclaim as one of the first works to give such raw and intensely personal emotions a literary treatment.

Little things stop her cold. In possibly February or March it occurs to her to give John’s clothes away. Sweatshirts, T-shirts, suits, jackets, cleaning out the receipts nestled in their pockets. She stops at the shoes, and then she realises why: he would need shoes if he was to return.

On one level, she’s entirely aware that her thought processes this year are irrational. She understands she’s in shock, what with the bedrock of her life having been removed, so why wouldn’t they be? But the awareness of her irrationality does nothing to eradicate it. She fully accepts that her life from now on will be a series of disorientations. She replays key scenes over and over again in her mind’s eye to blunt the trauma, constructs chronologies with the dispassion of autopsy reports to wring any more meaning she possibly can. The only way to cope with a life that doesn’t make sense is to approach it with a degree of numbness, a distance.

She began writing The Year of Magical Thinking toward the end of the titular year. October 2004. Ten months of distance. And yet she describes her emotional state over the year so palpably that I can almost believe she wrote it moment by moment.

In particular, she describes a phenomenon that she calls the vortex effect very acutely. Innocuous things—a sign in a shop window, a photograph, an LA townhouse, an advert—would send her train of thought on well-worn paths that would inexorably barrel down on something that reminded her of John. In order to maintain a semblance of sanity, she would deliberately try to avoid the presence of anything which reliably triggered the vortex effect. This required ingenuity. There were streets she could not cross, shops she could not enter, topics she could not read on, lest she encounter one of the forbidden stimuli and fall headlong into the vortex.

These passages about the vortex effect gave me pangs of recognition, but simultaneously, alienation. I’ve never dealt with so close a death in my life yet (the closest would be my grandfather, who died when I was thirteen), but I have dealt with grief. And reading of the vortex effect described so nakedly gave me jolts of validation: yes, I’ve felt this before, there have been moments where innocuous stimuli, storefronts and pop songs, have barrelled me into pangs of “I miss you, I miss you so much”. But what felt foreign to me was the deliberate lengths she took to forestall the vortex. Whereas I have been entirely given to wallowing in my grief, mulling over my loss until it left me numb, she had the fortitude to recognise that the vortex was debilitating to her. I admire this. I imagine that this awareness is something you gain only after you’ve hit rock bottom.

The trade dress of my copy of The Year of Magical Thinking features a black-and-white photograph of her family on the back cover. Malibu, 1976. From right to left: herself, her husband, and her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who had been hospitalised with pneumonia at the moment of her father’s death and would become hospitalised again in LA over the next year. When I looked Joan Didion up on Wikipedia, I learned that Quintana had died of pancreatitis two months before the book’s publication, but Didion did not revise the manuscript. Then I glanced at the back cover again, and I thought Ah, maybe that’s why she selected a photograph of her whole family, and that broke me.