AustLit

'Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking begins: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” After the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, she examines grief the way a writer examines anything: “In times of trouble … read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.” Mark Raphael Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Monash University, began writing Thirty Days after the death of his wife, Kerryn Baker. Like Didion’s, his work is framed by a motif of magic and the quest for a kind of cognitive trick that might turn back loss.' (Introduction)