Joan Didion's Allusions

I had mentioned that I thought that Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" contained too many quotations that made it appear that she wrote the book, with a stock of quotation references on her desk. It has been suggested that perhaps I was exaggerating, so I took another look.

In the small page, large print 225 page book, I see references/quotations as follows:

David Fromkin's "Europe's Last Summer", the book her husband was reading when he died.

Bob Herbert's column in the NY Times, 11-12-04.

The Merck Manual

"Up Close & Personal" , her husband's book.

"The Intern's Dilemma" an article in "Psychiatry in Medicine" 1972.

Temko, BBC TV series

Mrs. Miniver

Philip Aribes, "The Hour of Our Death"

"Chanson de Roland"

Eric Lindemann's study of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire.

Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Freud's 1917 "Mourning and Melancholia"

Melanie Klein's 1940 study "Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States"

Teresa Heinz Kerry's comments on her first husband's death

Poetry of e.e. cummings

"East Coker", perhaps poetry by Susanna Moore

Catullus, "On His Brother's Death"

C.S. Lewis, "A Grief Observed"

Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"

Matthew Arnold's "The Forsaken Moment"

W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues"

National Academy of Sciences "Bereavement: Reactions, Consequences and Care"

J. William Worden's report of the Harvard Bereavement Study

Study of widowers by Benjamin Young in "The Lancet" in 1963

Study of bereaved relatives by Rees and Lutkins, in the "British Medical Journal" 1967.

Her husband's "Dutch Shea, Jr."

Hitchcock's "Vertigo"

Walter Savage Aylmer's "Rose Alymer" of 1806

Vamik Volkan's article on "regrief therapy"

Bibring's "Psychoanalysis and the Dynamic Psychotherapies" in "Journal of the American Psychiatric Association" of 1954

Emily Post's book of etiquette on funerals, 1922

Phillippe Aries, "Western Attitudes Towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present"

Geoffrey Gorer's "Death, Grief and Mourning", 1965

This will take you through Chapter 4, ending on about page 65.

Looking at these references in this way, it shows the intellectual approach she took to understanding what her situation was after the death of her husband, and perhaps a list of books, articles, etc. like this could be of help to others. My point was that it did not add to my interest in reading the book.