By Michael H. Sangree

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking says so right on the cover, with ‘Joan’ getting the biggest font and ‘The Year of’ the smallest.

There’s a nice family picture on the back, the author and her daughter both glancing sideways, her husband gazing at the camera dead-on, an interesting, moon-faced sort of man in a tweed jacket, the kind of guy with whom I’d like to drink a scotch. Malibu is one hell of a zipcode, book writing business surely has been kind to Ms. Joan Didion.

“Life changes fast / Life changes in the instant / You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” This is one of those little quotes that strikes with the force of truth the moment you read it, that’s why they put it on the back of The Year of Magical Thinking.

It’s like that book re the theory of incompleteness, how can you not buy it, you know nothing’s ever complete. Turns out, the thing is a whole lot of teutonic philosophy and math, yuck.

Same thing with life changing in an instant, on the back of a book about disease death grief & loss, it’s must-see tv, it says take me to the check-out, you’re out of the store with it in a bag before you remember that you were looking for the feel good dvd of the century.

Life doesn’t change in the instant, however. Those clever jacket designers at Knopf saw fit to leave off the epigram’s last line, “The question of self-pity.” Self-pity and its questions tend tb the kiss of death when it comes to selling books.

Me, living an unwritten cancer memoir as I am, let me tell you, self-pity is the corpse at the feast, it’s the pedophile uncle at the wedding, it’s the AOL prepended to Time-Warner.

The middle part of the book requires further reading. The journey ends, as so many others do, with a note on the type. The book was set in Bodoni, a typeface named after Giamattista Bodoni, although how it differs from Times New Roman is a mystery to me.

Notes on the type always make me feel a bit sad. It’s like learning that every single lover you’ve ever had was faking from the word go, all that earth-moving was a pathetic lie.

Admit it, you were unaware of the Joan Bodoni typeface the whole damn time, reading in bed, reading on the train, broad daylight, the red shades of twilight and dawn, the stolen sideways glances as you cruise down the commuter lanes of this great land: not a once did the great hand of Joan Bodoni reveal itself to you.

It’s as if you are at dinner, a piece of chicken in your windpipe, watching your life drifting drifting away from you like a cliff from a suicide… as your vision ebbs and your brief moment on stage fades to black, you plantively look from spouse to offspring: they hold their forks poised above their meals as if interrupted, watching blandly, as if you are of no real concern, a dropped napkin, a spilled glass — thankfully, only water! — nothing more than an after-image by now.

So the hovering is-everything-okay waiter saves your day, the half-chewed morsel fires across the room like the punchline of a bad joke, the light returns with the blood to your brain, and now you know the question if not the answer, the question of self-pity, you don’t need no friggin Joan Bodoni to answer this one. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking