The Decade of Attempting to Think Magically

Through the lense of Joan Didion's 2005 memoir, I've finally decided to write about my father.

After never having been outside of the United States in my 28 years of life, I moved to Prague over a month ago. It’s the kind of move that has had an almost psychedelic kind of effect on me. After 28 years of a certain level of settling into ease, security, and frankly, boredom, my brain has seemingly re-opened and I feel like a child again. Every day, I am forced to learn a new basic fundamental of living.

Emotionally, it has been more than rewarding. The slight twinges of homesickness are offset by the excitement and potential that the possibility and opportunity of a new place brings.

One of the things I love most about Prague is the literary culture. Every day on the metro I find myself sitting next to someone reading Murakami, Proust, or some other literary giant. At home in the Florida panhandle I felt like I was pretty well-read. Now, I suddenly feel like I have catching-up to do. I am 28 and once again the second grader who tried to read Fellowship of the Ring too early, the middle schooler who thought he could comprehend Beyond Good and Evil.

So, on my second day in the city I found a bookstore called The Globe and picked up Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women and Peter Demetz’ Prague in Black and Gold, but it was the third choice I made that has reopened many old wounds and, at a time when I should be looking ahead, inspired me to instead look back and finally write about my father: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.