[Peace-discuss] Joan Didion, 1934-2021

[Szoke, Ron]

Joan Didion (Dec. 5, 1934—Dec. 23, 2021)

I open another issue of _Daedalus_, this one devoted to the concept of “happiness.”  One piece on happiness, the joint work of Robert Biswas-Diener of the University of Oregon and Ed Diener and Maya Tamir of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, noted that although “research has shown that people can adapt to a wide range of good and bad life events in less than two months,” there remained “some events to which people are slow or unable to adapt completely.”  Unemployment was one such event.  “We also find,”  the authors added, “that it takes the average widow many years after her spouse’s death to regain her former level of life satisfaction.”   
     Was I “the average widow”?  What in fact would have been my “former level of life satisfaction”?  

=>  _The Year of Magical Thinking_ (Knopf, 2005, pages 169-170)