The Year of Magical Thinking

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes of the period in her life in which her husband died suddenly and her daughter was hospitalized with a serious illness that included ICU, coma, trach, medevac etc. Months and months of it. To think of anything even remotely similar happening to my own children is horrifying.

Yet I find my sympathy for Didion seriously limited.

For interspersed with her experiences with adversity, one also reads of dinner at a NY restaurant on the way home from the hospital where her daughter lies in a coma; a friend who offers a seat on his friend's plane when Didion needs to rush to her daughter's bedside on the west coast; memories of long term stays in Hawaii, trips to Bogota and France, the Beverly Hills hotel where she stays during her daughter's illness, of living in the gatehouse of an ocean front home when she and her husband were just starting our and  don't have enough money to tip the restaurant parking valets (her way of describing their limited funds); of Princeton and Berkeley, of glasses of wine while gazing out at the ocean,and of a nanny named Jennifer who accompanies them from NY to LA. Hotels, restaurants and celebrities are named as if readers should know who they are.

Instead of thinking oh how moving, oh what fine writing, oh what keen understanding, I grind my teeth and close the book.  I expected to say "achingly beautiful," but instead I think "self-absorbed." Does this make me a bad person?  Because Didion has money, she can not have my sympathy?

or did she write it this way on purpose so I would think about this very thing?