The Year Of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

This book starts with the mechanism of directly addressing the reader, immediately after the author's husband collapses and is rushed to hospital: you'll want to remember the name of this medicine, you'll lie to yourself in such and such a way -- yes you, you think it will be different for you, but it won't be.

Almost immediately, I found myself feeling alienated from Didion, but not for the reasons she described: her life seemed unlike mine not because of its tragedy (which is intense, and movingly written about), but its glory. She knows every specialist doctor in New York; she flies to Paris on a moment's notice; she won't shut up about her house by the beach in Malibu.
Then I realised that I was obviously doing the thing -- the magical thinking thing -- where you tell yourself how this person that terrible things happened to is not like you, (presumably) so that you can (somehow) imagine that the terrible things won't happen to you. I don't think I've ever observed my own mind doing this so intensely in real time. I really, really disliked Didion while reading this, and to notice yourself disliking a person who is just honestly, raw-ly talking about terrible events in their life is.... a mindfuck, I'm not sure what else to call it.

I will never stop promoting this article by Gene Weingarten about parents who tragically forget their babies in the back seats of cars:https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/fatal-distraction-forgetting-a-child-in-thebackseat-of-a-car-is-a-horrifying-mistake-is-it-a-crime/2014/06/16/8ae0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html

Weingarten's theory is that we don't want to believe that we're all just flawed brains in vulnerable bodies, so when people hear about these tragic accidents they come up with a reason why the parent is a monster, a bad person who was (e.g.) too busy thinking about money to remember their kid was in the back seat, and since I'm not a person like that, this devastation could never happen to me.

What I find interesting while watching myself reacting to Didion is that the situation is not really like that, I'm not thinking "you're so privileged and therefore these terrible things happened to you," the two are not related even in my mangled mind. The reaction is literally just "this terrible thing happened to this person, here is a reason why I find this person unrelatable and dislikable". It's.... I don't know, I don't know what it is.