Michelle Huelle’s Reviews > The Year of Magical Thinking > Status Update

"Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?"

It seems so for me. To sit with my thoughts and organize them into sentences I find myself. I dreams another part of myself bubbles up and reveals itself to my waking self, if I choose to see it.

Breath-taking.

Mrs. Post... wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view. Philippe Ariès noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. "Death," he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden."

I had forgotten how much this book made me feel the first time I read it. It's like you're right there with her, not in the physical details but in the feelings.

"...confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred..."