These days everyone is an author. As texting and Facebook continue dominate as a form of mass communication it has become fashionable to write out one’s thoughts or perceptions to document the day. People post their lives so they can get the opinions of a wider audience. Is this a form of autobiography? One might think so, for it tells of the religious, spiritual, entrepreneurial, and personal experiences of its authors. Yet there is so much more involved in a true autobiography. The life must have had an impact on the surrounding world, in either a positive or negative way. It must engage the reader. The autobiography is literally a route to get to the place or ideal that the author has obtained. The life therefore must be interesting,…show more content… As she and her late husband, John Dunne, were both writers, their work days and play days wove together as threads in a garment, “After each afternoon’s Tenko segment we would go upstairs and work another hour or two, John in his office at the top of the stairs, me in the glassed-in porch across the hall that had become my office” (Didion 24). It is this kind of stark, unflattering reporting of Didion’s own daily life that enables one to begin trust her judgement of herself and her life. Her accuracy is entertaining and allows the reader to relate. She shares the details of her marriage,” We were married on the afternoon of January 30, 1964, a Thursday, at the Catholic Mission of San Juan Bautista in San Benito County, California” (Didion 69). She mentions the bars, eating habits, and the vacation spots of her and her…show more content… She mentions what it feels like to experience the loss of a husband and have no answers. Spiritual is a human lack, while simultaneously being taken care of in ways one does not understand. It is not her mastery of grief that makes this work so unbelievably tangible and personal, it is the transparency of Didion’s inability to cope with the loss of John that makes this autobiography useful those anyone going through the motions of insanity that grief brings out in people. Didion talks of having no appetite “Had I eaten?” (Didion 30). She commits on the confusion, “Until the morning. When, only half awake, I tried to think why I was alone in the bed” (Didion 31). She mentions that grief is actually temporary madness, in which one cannot associate correctly. To avoid places that revive memories of John which creates the painful “vortex”, so she takes certain routes to safely maneuver throughout her day. Her life is lived in this cocoon of safety and ritual as, “Rituals replace reality” (43). The “Magical Thinking” is that if she does not experience the pain and reality of her husband’s death she may be able to
