Didion Piece - Nicole Wurzell

I know there were some differing opinions in class about this article, but i personally really enjoyed it. there is a lot of conflict in the peice because i think didion is trying to reconcile her job as a literary journalist (reporting the facts, keeping close detail, etc) and the trauma of being suddenly and unexpectedly widowed. i see how this book would be read for coping groups because didion strips the formalities away from act of grieving and shows the process in a more raw and real form. at first i was thrown off by how cold she seems to be, especially when she was talking about the autopsy - it seems to eerie to actually want to see your love one all hacked up, but by the end of the piece i thought her attitude was very refreshing. i also really liked how she dealt with the idea of time through the piece, all the little details like waiting in line at the hospital, pondering what time he would have died in LA, looking up the eleveator records to see when the paramendics arrived/left - i think this all goes along with the time that she keeps in the piece because she is constantly skipping from the present, to the past (when her husband died), to slipping in miscellaneous facts. i think the sporadic time records kept with the idea of the unexpected. overall, i really liked this piece, i thought it was powerful and very raw.

Comments

[Veronica Lewis]

I also enjoyed the Didion piece, but, at the same time, I felt that the piece was a little out of the ordinary, if that makes any sense. She approaches her husband's death as an outsider, which makes it seem really odd, since it was her husband that she is writing about and not some stranger. I could not fathom how she could separate her journalistic capabilities and emotions in writing this piece. It almost seemed as though she was inhumane and completely emotionless, which takes the most important aspect out of a literary journalism piece.

[Veronica Lewis]

Didion's piece also makes me think: where could we even begin to approach a story in the manner that Didion did? What type of personal steps would we have to take to separate our emotions and professionalism. But, in a way, did Didion use this piece to express her emotions and cope with her husband's death?

[Nicole Wurzell]

i do think that didion used writing this piece as a tool to help her cope with her husbands death. she wrote this piece with such raw and sometimes in-your-face harshness that i think we can actually see her going through the grieving process. i think she also wanted to dispell the myths about death by showing that not everyone has to have the same reaction and grieve in the same way just to show that they are "coping" with the death of a loved one. perhaps this was also a way for her to alleviate guilt she had for not handling her husbands death the way most people would have? or maybe she wanted to explain why she did have the response she did. i don't know either way, but looking back i think that this was one of the most honest pieces we have read this quarter, obviously because it deals with the closest relationship any of the authors have had to their topic, but also because i felt like didion was writing this piece for herself, not really caring how it was received (even though we did discuss the whole 'im john mcphee bitch' mentality that comes with journalists of this caliber).

[Marites Yao]

perhaps this was also a way for her to alleviate guilt she had for not handling her husbands death the way most people would have?

I agree with you that did write this piece as a way to alleviate the way she was handling the piece. Interestingly, she writes of how she writes how she endured with the loss, but i wonder if there were any things that she happened to leave out. I don't think that it was entirely a way for her to alleviate her guilt, but I think it was rather a way for her to let others know how she was handling this loss and to an extent normalize the fact that people grieve in different ways.