… Dino D’Agata discusses Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking and Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death in his “Hope as Forbidden Metaphor“.
“Yet Didion also, to my chagrin, succumbs to post-modernity’s coercion when she, like Rieff, begins recriminating herself for wanting to believe her husband still lives. You want to shake her and say, for Christ’s sake, Joan, is there anyone who truly loves who doesn’t feel that way towards the person she loves?”
“What both of these memoirs produce in me, however, is a resentment against the mentality that wants to take Didion’s love for her husband and daughter, Rieff’s love for his mother, and strangle it, force it to espouse intellectual positions that disallow any hope of an eternal existence…”