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The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

3.74 · rating details · 30,010 ratings · 4,178 reviews

From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only da...more

Hardcover, 227 pages

Published February 13th 2007 by Knopf (first published January 1st 2005)

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May 28, 2007

steffie rated it

Recommends it for: Thin, Wealthy Women

I didn't go gaga over this book. While I like Didion's writing, I just didn't care much for her or her oddly privileged lifestyle. I realize that wealth doesn't except you from grief, but I felt this book was needlessly full of details that did nothing but drive a wedge between me and this woman. A free ticket on the Concorde? Why do Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, of all people, have a free ticket on the Concorde? Dominick Dunne, maybe. Because he's totally about Power and Privilege.
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Dec 21, 2011

Gavin rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: essays-auto-bio

I am not the type of person that cries at funerals. I find crying at a funeral as constructive as trying to stop a raging river with a few paper towels and a bag of sand, nothing is achieved. Find me not callous, for I am sensitive to the recently departed and their family. It's just that...I don't know...I know there is nothing that can be done to bring back that person. Rereading the above really makes me sound like an ass so let me try it another way: death is something we all have to ac...moreI am not the type of person that cries at funerals. I find crying at a funeral as constructive as trying to stop a raging river with a few paper towels and a bag of sand, nothing is achieved. Find me not callous, for I am sensitive to the recently departed and their family. It's just that...I don't know...I know there is nothing that can be done to bring back that person. Rereading the above really makes me sound like an ass so let me try it another way: death is something we all have to accept; my acceptance of death comes more easily than it does for others.

Take Didion for example. Here we have a very educated woman who foggily ambles through the year following her husband's (John Gregory Dunne) death. John died of a severe infarction. He had a long history of heart issues. He knew this was the way he was going to die. But even with all this evidence, his personal testimony, Didion finds the death of her husband shocking, as if she were blindsided. (I’ll grant that no one wants to be in mid-conversation with someone when they die.) Now stop cursing me, let me continue. John’s death in-and-of-itself does not make this story compelling. Quintana, John and Didion’s daughter, and her sickness is what makes this story compelling. You see, we are all going to die. Husbands will have to bury wives, and wives will have to bury husbands. That’s life. But none of us ever want to experience having to bury a child. And the way that Didion structures her story allows her to think she is grieving for her husband, when, in reality, she is telling their story to mask the fact that she is scared shitless about losing her daughter.

You see, Didion does a great job of recounting the great love her and John shared for almost forty years. But some of the details that she gives the reader really only show that we (the readers) will never know what it was like to live a life with John. We’ll never know what it feels like to get a free ticket on the Concorde; we’ll never know what it’s like to get free tickets from the NBA commissioner; basically, we’ll never know what it was like to live a life of affluence and prestige. But, even without ever knowing this aspect of her life, we will all more than likely at some point fear for our child, which is the bridge that connects us to Didion. During the chaotic (brilliant narration, stylistic technique) timelines and temporal displacements via vortexes, Didion is unable to mask the fear she has of losing her only child. Unfortunately, Didion also realizes that this year of magical thinking is less about her husband and more about her daughter and closes the door for us readers over and over again just as we are about to get a real true glimpse into Didion’s grief. You see, Didion was able to deal with her husband’s death; what she was unable to deal with was the possibility of losing her child.

But even with the absence of these concrete feelings, and the insertion of insights from countless psychiatrists and research papers about grief, the story works. Didion understands that she might be able to hide from the reader, allow for what information is passed-along to us, as long as she is able to stay one step in front of her feelings. Fortunately for us, grief and confusion and frustration and anger and misery know no boundaries. What is never said on the written page is said with infinite detail in the between spaces of events and conversations within the story. The year of which Didion chronicles is truly heart-wrenching; I’m pretty sure I would not be able to cope as well as she did. But it is also full of promise, redemptions, and hope.

This is a beautiful and tragic story, one that is sure to become a classic concerning death and the grieving process.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
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Feb 07, 2010

Kim rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: readers who don't give up

Recommended to Kim by: Maurice

Shelves: contemporary, holy-shit, essays, for-realz, maurice, rubbernecking

You might think of me as a cynic.

If you’re being kind, that is. I’m the one that says ’Seriously?’ when being told of some tragic event--like someone would actually make up the horrific thing. I’m the one that views the whole process of death--the telling, the grieving, the service of any kind, the ’after’-- as playing out like I’m in a soap opera bubble. Which camera should I look into when I break down again? Strike one against me.

Strike Two: I've never been much ...more

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Jul 20, 2007

Sara rated it

· review of another edition

"you sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. the question of self-pity."

i picked up this book and read it knowing nothing more than those two short lines. those two lines which become the refrain of the memoir.

i think i must have been drawn to it intuitively, i needed to read this book when i did. didion's memoir records her thoughts, feelings and actions during the year following her husband's death and her daughter's near-death hospitalizations (i...more

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Jan 02, 2008

Kate rated it

Shelves: non-fiction, biographies-and-memoirs, the-100-in-2007

Joan Didion's daughter Quintana fell gravely ill and was hospitalized with a serious infection. She was placed in a medical coma and put on life support. Only weeks later, Joan's husband, John Dunne, was speaking with her from their living room after visiting their daughter in the hospital, stopped mid-sentence and keeled over dead on the floor of a massive coronary. Four weeks later, Quintana pulled through and revived, but only two months after that, she collapsed from a massive brain hematoma...moreJoan Didion's daughter Quintana fell gravely ill and was hospitalized with a serious infection. She was placed in a medical coma and put on life support. Only weeks later, Joan's husband, John Dunne, was speaking with her from their living room after visiting their daughter in the hospital, stopped mid-sentence and keeled over dead on the floor of a massive coronary. Four weeks later, Quintana pulled through and revived, but only two months after that, she collapsed from a massive brain hematoma.

Joan Didion documented this year in this book, which I think I heard about on NPR or somewhere, I'm not entirely sure. I know you're all going to hate me for kicking the widow when she's down, but this book was a lot less than I expected. I got through it, but I really thought it would be more about her feelings. Instead, Didion did a lot of research on grief and puts many of her findings in the book. She spends a lot of time analyzing the way things are and trying to figure out if she's behaving in a way that seems "normal" for your "average widow."

I read a review on Amazon.com that calls Joan Didion's writing as "cool" and perhaps lacking emotion, and I felt that way about this book. The most moving passage in the whole book was one in which she states that she realized she was in denial when she cleaned out her husband's closets, but couldn't get rid of his shoes because he would need them when he got back. I thought to myself, "well, now we're getting somewhere", but perhaps she didn't want to share where those painful thoughts led, because there was no indication that she picked the shoes up and flung them at the walls while sobbing in rage. And I wanted her to. I wanted her to be angry at God and everyone for putting her in this terrible situation with her husband's death and her daughter's serious illnesses. But instead, she seemed rather detached. Maybe she didn't want to share those feelings, but if that were so, she shouldn't have written a book purporting to be about that very topic. I found this book to be tremendously disappointing.
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Jul 25, 2008

Simeon Berry rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, non-fiction, literary, literary-read

I also thought this book was tremendously overrated. In the past, I loved Didion because she was a great stylist and a brilliant structuralist. The title essay of The White Album is probably the best-written essay of all time in my book, followed by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-up" and Charles Bowden's "Torch Song." She has the ability to analyze the personal politics of narrative, and to disclose just how weird and singular her brain is without even a trace of pity or se...more

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Mar 09, 2008

Don rated it

· review of another edition

It has been said that divorce is second in psychological trauma only to the loss of a spouse. Personally, I think that’s bullshit; loss of a child must trump all. In any case, Ms. Didion is of the opinion that loss through divorce is mitigated by the ex-spouses corporeal presence on this fine earth; i.e. they’re still alive and well and accessible. Indeed ex-spouses are a present and constant reminder of failure. They are a walking, talking embodiment of the life you thought you would have f...more

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May 21, 2007

noisy penguin rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: no one should read this book.

I hated this book. It is the reason I instituted my "100 pages" policy (if it's not promising 100 pages in, I will no longer waste my time on it). So within the 100 pages I did read, all I got from Didion was that she and her husband used to live a fabulous life and they know a lot of famous people. She spoke of the '60s as a time when "everyone" was flying from LA to San Francisco for dinner. Um, no, actually, "everyone" wasn't doing that then and they're not doing...more

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Sep 03, 2007

Audrey rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: People who have their shit together

I don't think it's Joan Didion's fault that my reaction to this book was to question and/or deride several facets of my life: should I be closer to my husband, like the author? Was I wasting time? Why didn't I keep a real journal? Why were the sporadic sentences in my sad attempt a journal so poorly written? Why don't I have a kitchen notebook to write down my meals like Joan Didion? Why did I just switch tense? Shouldn't I be keeping better notes on the goings-on of my life? In any event, this ...more

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May 23, 2008

Samilja rated it

· review of another edition

This wasn't exactly what I expected. I knew from an interview with Didion on Fresh Air that the book was written in the year that followed the death of her husband - A year she spent mostly in hospitals at her adult daughter's bedside. The daughter, Quintana, suffered various illnesses and injuries that year, all of them serious & potentially fatal. The medical odyssey had begun just five days before her husband's sudden death from a heart attack. He died, in fact, in the couple's living room ha...moreThis wasn't exactly what I expected. I knew from an interview with Didion on Fresh Air that the book was written in the year that followed the death of her husband - A year she spent mostly in hospitals at her adult daughter's bedside. The daughter, Quintana, suffered various illnesses and injuries that year, all of them serious & potentially fatal. The medical odyssey had begun just five days before her husband's sudden death from a heart attack. He died, in fact, in the couple's living room having just returned for the night from their daughter's hospital room.

What I expected was a memoir of the piled-upon trajedies. I guess I did get that, just not how I'd imagined. I expected emotion and poignant anecdotes that would be intimate but also somehow metaphorical on the grand scale (she is a famous fiction writer after all, if anyone could deliver this it would be her).

Turns out, Didion is not a particularly emotive person. She is however a true believer that knowledge is power [reminding me of one of my favorite quotes] and she attacks both her grief and her daughter's poor health as a researcher and investigator. She quickly abandons the grief books of self-help ilk for actual, scientific and psychological studies and treatises. For medical manuals and calling in favors from medical professionals with whom she has one connection or another. Then she studies her self in a remarkably objective manner (perhaps aided by shock?) armed with this new knowledge.

I've read some of the other reviews of this book on goodreads and note that those that are particularly critical don't like the coldness with which Didion approaches the book but I took that as self-preservation. She had to keep moving or she might, literally, shrivel up and die. To explore her illogical behaviors (like keeping her husbands shoes even after giving up the rest of his clothes) and her increasingly tenuous grasp on the present (much of the book is expository, with Didion letting present details lead her back to various experiences that she analyzes and re-analyzes with the detriment of hindsight) is her way of keeping afloat. It's those very qualities of her grief, human and irrational, that made Didion, to me, a sympathetic author.

The 'magical' thinking in the title refers to her insistence throughout the year, though private and mostly subconscious, that if she could just analyze things correctly or do everything in a particular, precise way her husband would come back and rejoin their life. That's a desperation a lot of us can relate to - even if we muddled through it in ways very different from Didion's.

I enjoyed the reminiscing - a peek into the lives of two prominent U.S. authors of the last half century and those with whom they held court. I found Didion's research fascinating and more so the way she applied it to her own circumstance and then considered the data. The book made me think about my own choices and how I might reconsider them in the future, when things are different and the faux security of youth are gone.
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Nov 09, 2007

Tucker rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: finished

Didion breaks a cardinal rule of story-writing, which is to have something happen. The only events that occur in this book are the instantaneous cardiac arrest of her husband and an illness that puts her daughter on life support. Even these, due to Didion's weaving, do not feel like ordinary events in a plotline. She tells pieces of the story over and over again through the various angles of memory, as though her grief had been journalled and later assembled as a mosaic instead of in chronolo...moreDidion breaks a cardinal rule of story-writing, which is to have something happen. The only events that occur in this book are the instantaneous cardiac arrest of her husband and an illness that puts her daughter on life support. Even these, due to Didion's weaving, do not feel like ordinary events in a plotline. She tells pieces of the story over and over again through the various angles of memory, as though her grief had been journalled and later assembled as a mosaic instead of in chronological order.

The value of the book is as a series of personal and occasionally psycho-academic (but well-integrated) reflections on grief.

"The Year of Magical Thinking" refers to her denial that her husband is gone for good. Although she does not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, nevertheless, she says, she feels certain her husband will come back. In the second half of the book, there is an interesting exploration of the Greek play Alcestis, in which a king begs his family to die in his place. Only his wife volunteers to die, and when Charon comes to ferry her away, the king is racked with guilt. The queen eventually returns from the dead. Didion asks: "If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them, we who allowed them to die?"

There is a meditation on the idea of luck: whether, if one has been lucky in the past, it is appropriate to consider oneself unlucky later on when something bad happens, and whether one should expect that the playing field will eventually be leveled.

"All year," Didion writes, "I had been keeping time by last year's calendar. What were we doing on this day last year?" She is shocked when she crosses the one-year mark, and realizes she has over a year's worth of memories that do not include her husband. (I would add that this behavior of "keeping time by last year's calendar" is not unique to the death of a loved one; it can happen with any life event that carries a sense of loss, such as a breakup.) Didion's moving conclusion reflects on the tsunami in 2004 that would have eradicated the islands where she once vacationed with her husband. "I know why we try to keep the dead alive. We try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves, there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead...Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water."(less)

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Nov 05, 2007

Kathaileen rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: biography-memoir

After I saw a short article about this book, I decided I would probably have to read it.
The author lost her husband suddenly while her only daughter was in a coma in the hospital. I loved the book and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has lost a spouse, parent, or someone close. And, to anyone in a long term marriage or relationship that still has both partners.
As I read it, I thought a lot about my mom and how these would have been her thoughts – if she had not been the firs...moreAfter I saw a short article about this book, I decided I would probably have to read it.
The author lost her husband suddenly while her only daughter was in a coma in the hospital. I loved the book and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has lost a spouse, parent, or someone close. And, to anyone in a long term marriage or relationship that still has both partners.
As I read it, I thought a lot about my mom and how these would have been her thoughts – if she had not been the first to go. I thought about my dad and, how he is dealing with her absence. I thought about Doug and our marriage and how it would be if one of us lost the other one. Joan Didion’s observations are right on and she communicates them to the reader so we can understand exactly what she means.
-Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
-our (I could not yet think my) house
-grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends
-Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night.
-I did not always think he was not right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted. There was no separation between our investments or interests in any given situation.
-Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the daily ness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.”
-Grief was passive. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.
-The voice on the answering machine is still John’s. The fact that it was his in the first place was arbitrary, having to do with who was around n the day the answering machine last needed programming, but if I needed to retape it now I would do so with a sense of betrayal. One day when I was talking on the telephone in his office I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary that he had always left open on the table by the desk. When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking?
-As he saw it, he now had a death sentence, temporarily suspended – he knew how he was going to die. As I saw it, the timing had been providential, the intervention successful the problem solved.
-“Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write. That’s my birthday present to you.”
-who would see the blood streaming down my leg, who would get the taxi, who would be with me in the emergency room. Who would be with me once I came home?
-their son had been ‘hit hard by the sixties’
-Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.
-something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.
-C.S. Lewis “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense.”…So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.
-We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows.
-Marriage is memory. Marriage is time. “She didn’t know the songs”. Marriage is not only time: it is paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.
Postscript: Joan Didion’s daughter Quantana died of pancreatitis in August 2005.

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Oct 24, 2007

Elyssa rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

I discovered this book when I read Joan Didion's article in The New York Times Magazine. The article was a much shorter version of the book and it really spoke to me, as someone who experienced a significant loss. I figured the book would be an expansion of the article and it was; however, it expanded in ways that did not resonate with me as much as that initial article.

The book reads like random notes that Joan Didion jotted down in the depths of her grief. In some ways, I identifi...moreI discovered this book when I read Joan Didion's article in The New York Times Magazine. The article was a much shorter version of the book and it really spoke to me, as someone who experienced a significant loss. I figured the book would be an expansion of the article and it was; however, it expanded in ways that did not resonate with me as much as that initial article.

The book reads like random notes that Joan Didion jotted down in the depths of her grief. In some ways, I identified with this because it mirrors the mourning process, which can cause stream-of-consciousness and "magical thinking". After awhile, though, the prose grew tiresome and I yearned for the condensed version as presented in the article. That might sound shallow, but the article effectively captured the complexities of grief without sacrificing brutal realism.

There were some parts of the book I did like. I appreciated her portrayal of seeing reminders of the deceased person, i.e. a stack of books left untouched or specific places experienced together, and how that can trigger a slew of memories. She talks about the desire to write down detailed notes of the deceased person's last moments to truly grasp the finality of his/her life. Also, the reflex to call the deceased to tell them about something that he/she would appreciate. And, in the end, her realization that the grieving survivor needs to just let go and let the dead person be dead was powerful.

Overall, the book should be lauded for addressing the issue of grief itself. Grief is a lonely experience, primarily because it is suppressed in this culture after a prescribed period of time. The fact that Didion devoted a whole book to the topic is commendable. She gave a voice to those who have struggled with the mourning process. Unfortunately, her book does not speak for everyone, but hopefully it allows readers to delve into their own experiences.

The best part of the book was revisiting the segments from the original article. Didion's observations about grief from the article are so accurate that I found the tears welling up as I remembered the pain of loss. In the end, I can give the book 3 stars because parts of it are so well written and I admire her for going into the heart of her despair and sharing it publicly. (less)

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Jul 02, 2007

sydney rated it

· review of another edition

"A memoir...says: This is what my memory insists on, this is what my memory will not let go, these points of memory make me who I am, and all that others find incomprehensible about me is explained by what's in here." -Andrea Dworkin (not from or related to The Year of Magical Thinking)

I love memoirs because they're like roadmaps to being a human. They tell you what it feels like to have a certain experience. They don't claim to be the authority on that experience, but th...more

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Jun 14, 2007

Dawn rated it

Recommends it for: No One

Hated it, hated it, hated it- but kept reading with the hope that all my pain and suffering would somehow be worth it in the end. It wasn't. The same self-pitying, whiney, depressing, self-important sentiments are basically repeated over and over again only with different words. Joan Didion can obviously write well, but she should have left this cathartic piece in her closet. And I'm not averse to reading novels that deal with grief. This one was just way too self-indulgent and redundant for...more

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Aug 08, 2008

Kate rated it

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Shelves: memoir

What has stayed with me most from this book is her idea of "the shallowness of sanity." We move through life as though our days aren't numbered; death or tragedy shocks us into another mental state. "Sanity" involves a kind of denial of mortality.

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Jan 09, 2008

Tung rated it

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Shelves: memoirs

A National Book Award-winner, this book is Didion’s personal memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Dunne. Didion lays out her thought processes and emotions and struggle for normalcy after Dunne passes away suddenly one night at the dinner table from a heart problem. I didn’t find this book nearly as good as the hype would lead me to believe. The NY Times review called it an "indelible portrait of loss and grief." The NY Review of Books said "I can’t ...more A National Book Award-winner, this book is Didion’s personal memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Dunne. Didion lays out her thought processes and emotions and struggle for normalcy after Dunne passes away suddenly one night at the dinner table from a heart problem. I didn’t find this book nearly as good as the hype would lead me to believe. The NY Times review called it an "indelible portrait of loss and grief." The NY Review of Books said "I can’t imagine dying without this book." For me, it earned none of the preceding words of praise. Books on grief have been done much better, including one referenced multiple times throughout Didion’s book (A Grief Observed by CS Lewis is far superior). I am absolutely convinced that the only reason Didion’s book received such notably positive press was because she and her husband were good friends with all these reviewers and the rest of the literary community, having bonded with these people at dinner parties on the Upper East Side in smoking jackets with martinis and cigars; Didion and Dunne were part of the NYC writing establishment Didion’s prose throughout is tight and reminiscent of early Vonnegut (his self-referencing style, not his humor), but there is an emotional distance in her writing. She quotes numerous studies on grief throughout the book, having spent the months following the tragedy not only grieving but studying grief. But the research studies don’t serve to illuminate her grief; they serve to distance us from her grief. Secondly, Didion lived a very upper-crust NY life, and the way she describes the events she will miss doing (dining at Morton’s with her husband, walking on the Jardin du Ranelagh in Paris with her husband, skipping the Monet exhibit to dine at Conti’s with her husband) further distances me from Didion’s grief. Personally, I don’t find rich people experiencing tragedy as tragic as I would find average people experiencing tragedy. I found this too emotionally detached to recommend it. (less)

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Jul 24, 2007

Jonathan added it · review of another edition

Shelves: readit

I'd heard good things from this book, from an acclaimed author I had never even heard of who bears a small resemblance to Joni Mitchell and Sissy Spacek. This is all, of course, inconsequential.

I picked this book up when I was running away from my then boyfriend and on a midnight plane to Dublin.
It wasn't until three weeks later, whilst in London, that I started it. I find this all very important because it gives me a feel for what is written in the book that sort of refl...more
I'd heard good things from this book, from an acclaimed author I had never even heard of who bears a small resemblance to Joni Mitchell and Sissy Spacek. This is all, of course, inconsequential.

I picked this book up when I was running away from my then boyfriend and on a midnight plane to Dublin.
It wasn't until three weeks later, whilst in London, that I started it. I find this all very important because it gives me a feel for what is written in the book that sort of reflected what was going on in my life at the time.
I had not lost a husband but there were certainly changes going on in my life. This is an important aspect to consider, that we can feel grief in other ways besides death, that loneliness is there at any possible time and that our life shapes and moves forward in various ways.

The entire book is a meditation on death, dying, relationships, family and change. One night, Joan and her husband are about to sit down to dinner. Their daughter is very ill in hospital. When very suddenly, Joan's husband has a fatal heart attack.

The rest of a book is a musing on their relationship together, what it feels like to be a widow and have a life without a life-long companion. What death means, especially sudden death. There are pieces on travelling, famil, love, motherhood.
There are even fragments about what it means to be a writer, how you cope with grief as a writer, what do you do when the emotional level is so high you cannot even bring yourself to write.

It is a wonderful slim volume written in a direct and crisp prose that I recommend highly to read alone. I don't see it as a holiday book to read beside the beach, or something to read whilst anyone is talking. Each word and feeling must be savoured. Read it in the middle of the night or the early morning, with the window open to hear the slow hum of the night-time, with a good strong mug of coffee whilst you're curled up on the sofa or in bed.

It's the kind of book that will leave you feeling beaten up afterwards, amidst the direct formation of words there are many great ideas and cutting emotions, just make sure you have the emotional energy for it.(less)

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Jul 10, 2007

Kathy rated it

· review of another edition

I just loved the book because it reminded me of the feeling of grief.

Not the part you think remember from when you last experienced it. It is perhaps what you feel after the initial sadness and crying. It is the grief of picking up a phone to call someone before realizing they are gone for good, or the way a loss will seek out a way to occupy your thoughts.

I suspected this book would be very depressing, but it wasn't for me. It brought back the crazy rationalizations you...more

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Oct 18, 2007

Alan rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: th bereaved

An undeniable, biographically verified tragedy will carry a book a long way. But I felt her approach to sorrow to be one of control, to be an instance of a particularly American kind problem-solving, rather than of serious solitary reflection and attempted acceptance. I also found the cloistered, rarefied, routinized luxury of her life and world to be rather spoiled, despite its grave horrors. Though I enjoyed the stark realism, I might have enjoyed a less iron face than the one with which she, ...more

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May 29, 2008

Judi rated it

· review of another edition

This is one amazing book, and it turned me into a Joan Didion fan forever. Not a "happy" book at all, mind you -- it is a personal story about the sudden death of her husband and true partner and the aftermath. I could totally relate to the meaning behind the phrase "Magical Thinking" after the death of several very dear to me. You feel like if you could just reach around a corner, or a wrinkle in time, they would be right there.

Joan Didion's voice must be a ...more

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Oct 19, 2011

kissmyshades rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, american, biographical, non-fiction

"I remember a passage I wrote in the mid-1990s, The Last Thing He Wanted:

'Of course we would not need those last six notes to know what Elena's dreams were about. Elena's dreams were about dying. Elena's dreams were about getting old. Nobody here has not had (will not have) Elena's dreams. We all know that. The point is that Elena didn't. The point is that Elena remained remote most of all to herself, a clandestine agent who had so succesfully compartmentalized her operation as...more

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Apr 12, 2009

Dorothea rated it

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This is my first attempt to read anything written by Joan Didion. I picked up The Year of Magical thinking at a used book sale, after hearing her name thrown around in literary circles and not knowing anything about her. At this moment I'm only on page 76 and I don't know if I'll bother trying to make it to page 77 as the pretension is becoming unbearable.

The book is a series of essays she wrote after the death of her husband to whom she was married for 40 years. Little nuggets of...more

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Apr 28, 2010

Adrianna rated it

Recommends it for: Everyone

Recommended to Adrianna by: Cafe Libri (Yahoo Reading Group)

Shelves: autobiography

Originally, I read this book as a way to cope with a lot of family deaths that occurred during a difficult time in my life. It was recommended by a user of the Yahoo Cafe Libri Group, but it didn't live up to my expectations. Perhaps the disconnection lay in the fact that Didion suffered from the loss of a spouse whereas my grief was more distant: my cousin, grandmother, uncle, and great uncle all died in relative succession of each other. I also perceive the grieving process as being unique to ...moreOriginally, I read this book as a way to cope with a lot of family deaths that occurred during a difficult time in my life. It was recommended by a user of the Yahoo Cafe Libri Group, but it didn't live up to my expectations. Perhaps the disconnection lay in the fact that Didion suffered from the loss of a spouse whereas my grief was more distant: my cousin, grandmother, uncle, and great uncle all died in relative succession of each other. I also perceive the grieving process as being unique to each individual, and I found that Didion's coping mechanism was not like mine. She found solace in research whereas I felt numb and stopped reading and writing for a long time. I was so unable to control my emotions that I didn't attend all the funerals.

Despite grieving differently, I did discover some aspects that Didion and I shared: 1) depression 2) the inability to manage the everyday life, mine surfaced when I lost focus of my educational studies. Unfortunately, these similarities did not endear the book to me. However, I would still recommend The Year of Magical Thinking to any reader regardless of whether one has experienced a close death purely because it is a well-written and interesting autobiography.

The entire scope of the book follows the year of Didion's life after the death of her husband and the health complications that are endangering the life of her only child. It's not always a chronological examination because Didion's thoughts are fluid as they are constantly influenced by memories, items, and events that will take the reader to another place and time in her life (I liken these instances as memory triggers). Stylistically, the writing often seems like stream of consciousness, which actually makes the autobiography stand out as an unique representation of one person's life. Contributing to this style, the setting skips from New York, which is where her husband dies, to memories in Hawaii, Paris, and both past and present events in Los Angeles. Despite being difficult to follow the progression of time, Didion's grief is palpable through her memory associations.

The purpose for writing The Year of Magical Thinking is for author Joan Didion to analyze and understand her grief. Because it is such a personal story, her development and progression is often internalized and was difficult for a reader to relate to, especially if your thought process works differently. Despite that fact, she effectively develops her own state of mind and effectively explores the personalities of the two most important people in her life: a) her husband (John) b) her daughter (Quintana). She defines her love for both of them and grapples with grief, depression, fear, life, change, and, most importantly, acceptance. She explores the nuisances of language and uses medical and psychological research to maintain control, even though she knows that she can't control or change the past with her knowledge. Yet, it is the research that provides the comfort she desperately longs for. Also, the exploration of passages from her own writing as well as her husband's provide much needed connections between life and death.

One of the most disappointing aspects of the book is the lack of photos from Didion's life. True, she paints an emotional and philosophical portrait of the people she loves, but the physical descriptions are lacking, as if her husband was no longer substantial because he was already deceased while Quintana was fast approaching the same result. There is one image on the back cover which is misleading because it was taken in 1976 even though she is writing about the year from December 2003 to December 2004. Originally, I thought her daughter was a child in the autobiography, but it is revealed that she is a recently married adult. Still, the photo has sentimental value and is analyzed by Didion in the book (her daughter and husband are off to the left while she is looking at them from the right side of the patio).

Despite the fact that it is an interesting look at Didion's most painful year in her life, I could not relate and thus, my rating dropped considerably. I came looking for consolation and respite from my own painful memories. What I found was an interesting autobiography, but nothing that touched my soul. I was not lead to the path of healing. The research and psychological musings, although interesting, are not the way I cope with grief. I intensely cry at weird moments of the day with an inability to express my sadness. I feel an empty spot in my heart and soul that will never be filled no matter how many years go by. Didion's reliance on outside sources of comfort, such as research, made her appear cold and detached from the entire process. I wanted less studying and more raw emotions, similar to mine own.

The disconnection between the author and I was not the most disappointing aspect of this autobiography. The ending was the worst-- it was rushed and almost cliche. I never fully understood how she let go of the pain associated with her husband's death or how the year of her grief became The Year of Magical Thinking (and the title of her book). I attribute this disappointment to the fact that it is a very intimately written autobiography for Joan Didion, not the reader.

Even understanding this, I felt cheated. I was left with the same debilitating grief whereas Didion found closure. For this reason, I truly only recommend this book to those looking for a well-written autobiography. Readers who have experienced the death of a loved one should be weary about finding consolation between these pages.(less)

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Nov 28, 2007

Graceann rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: Everyone

Shelves: memoir

Please see my review at Amazon.com: Grace's Didion Book Review

Please click that my review was helpful at Amazon so that my rating continues to climb!

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Oct 29, 2010

Kristina rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Acutely candid and personal, like finding your mother's or grandmother's diary and discovering, years later, exactly what she was thinking, what was behind her eyes, in the grey matter, during one of the greatest tragedies of her life. This is this book at its best.

At its worst, it is an exercise in self-pity (the author writes it is so), that examines and re-examines the events surrounding her husband's death and her daughter's hospitalization during the winter of 2003-04. Over and...more

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Feb 03, 2009

John Struloeff rated it

· review of another edition

A powerful memoir that grabs you from the first few pages. Some extremely vivid scenes that will haunt you. I read this right after reading Philip Roth's Everyman, which seems now almost like a fictionalized version from her husband's perspective. The same sickening process of degrading health, the shock and surprise when the death itself occurs. My mother had a major heart attack last Christmas, and this book brought me back to those memories, the way the world seems to be cast in shadow, b...more

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Feb 28, 2009

Marcy rated it

· review of another edition

"I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." Joan Didion lived life backwards the first year her husband died at the table in which they were about to eat dinner. For forty years Joan and her husband spent almost every waking minute of their married life together, writing books, traveling, making sure that mov...more

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Aug 08, 2008

Greg rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: biography

Like Johnny Rotten said during their last (in the universe where they never would re-form again in the mid-90's) show, "Do you ever feel like you've been cheated?"
I do Johnny, I do.
I feel cheated by this book. I bought it because it cost me a dollar. I wasn't interested in it that much. I finally picked it up to read because I wanted to write a review about how pathetic and whiny it was. I thought I'd say something about how now that baby-boomers are starting to kic...moreLike Johnny Rotten said during their last (in the universe where they never would re-form again in the mid-90's) show, "Do you ever feel like you've been cheated?"
I do Johnny, I do.
I feel cheated by this book. I bought it because it cost me a dollar. I wasn't interested in it that much. I finally picked it up to read because I wanted to write a review about how pathetic and whiny it was. I thought I'd say something about how now that baby-boomers are starting to kick the bucket they want a fucking monopoly on death too, as if they invented grieving and no one before them could have possibly grieved like they do. Or maybe point out that we really don't need another memoir about someone dying and the way that the surviving family member found some shallow platitude to be true and now feels the need to share it. (i.e., "Everyone said life goes on, but I had to cry for awhile and then write a three hundred page book making it seem like I was the first person in the history of the whole world to have a parent die before realizing that 'hey it's true', and life does go on especially with the nice advance I got from the book deal. Thank you Random House!!")
But no, I don't get to attack Joan Didion. And part of me so wanted to. Instead of finding her whiny, or annoying, or exploitive or whatever I find that I have quite a bit of respect for her.
Other's apparently have had trouble with some of the name dropping that Didion does. Yes she does a lot of name dropping, her and her late husbands friends happen to be house-hold names (if you're household is bookish, maybe yours isn't, and there is nothing wrong with that). And maybe she does name drop the names of expensive hotels and restaurants she normally at in with her John Gregory Dunne, and maybe some people would rather have elaborate descriptions of the decor of these places then her just saying she ate there, or details about what so-and-so said at her husbands funeral, and not just that he or she spoke at it. But that's missing the point and if she had done that I would have been or so happy because I'd be writing a review right now about the banality of memoirs and their narcissistic egoism that only serves to make the author and publisher some dollars.
Instead Didion is really investigating and putting to paper the way that memory and perception work under the duress of grief. The snapshots of memory of a loved one don't necessarily contain any details about the table clothes of a favorite restaurant, but the place itself, it's name where it was located is a memory land mine of the deceased, waiting to go off and spiral out to other memories at it's mere mention.
This book deals with the irrational element of grief so well. It captures the mundane little things that can emotionally paralyze a person, and it's written from that place which our society would rather not acknowledge and that people should 'just get over', and there is no happy ending to the book, there is no climatic cathartic moment.
I've lost where I was going I think. Oh well. (less)

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Jul 24, 2008

Elizabeth rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: 2008, bio-memoir-diaries-letters, non-fiction, reviewed

I don't read a lot of books that people rave about; I rarely like them as much as everyone else does. So I was reluctant to pick up The Year of Magical Thinking; it had received so much hype. I'm still not sure it deserved all the praise it received, but so much of it was good that I'm willing forgive the crowd for getting excited about it.

I am trying to remember how many books I have read that have been about the death of a loved one and grieving for them. I know a lot of books that...moreI don't read a lot of books that people rave about; I rarely like them as much as everyone else does. So I was reluctant to pick up The Year of Magical Thinking; it had received so much hype. I'm still not sure it deserved all the praise it received, but so much of it was good that I'm willing forgive the crowd for getting excited about it.

I am trying to remember how many books I have read that have been about the death of a loved one and grieving for them. I know a lot of books that have this as one of many components, but only the death and the grief? Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death. Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing. The Year of Magical Thinking in another I would put high on the list of books that make you feel like you're going through it all yourself.

Didion wrote a book about pain and loss and how you can fall apart inside while still looking "strong" and "cool" on the outside. She wrote about how she wasn't able to keep herself from thinking about who she had lost and how she had lost him. She wrote about the first year after he was gone and how she got through it, all the while hoping it wouldn't end (she'd be too far away then). It was powerful and compelling and I was fascinated by all the little details of her daily life.

In the end, the book is twenty pages too long. The little details are great. The way she constructed the early description and her thoughts with the events was very smart. You weren't disoriented per se but you could see that she was unstable and that gave the reader a little instability as well, in a good way. Twenty pages from the end, it changes. There aren't the details. She's climbing up on the platform for the big finish. She got pretentiously deep, summing up ideas that she seems to have read in other people's books. I wasn't interested and the seeming necessity of it made me frustrated.

Overall, well worth reading, but I get the sense that I won't like the conclusions of her novels. This is probably the only work of hers I'll read, unlike Janice Galloway. The moment I finished The Trick is to Keep Breathing, I was looking for her other books. Definitely the better book about grief, I think.

(less)

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About Joan Didion

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She's best know for her novels and her literary journalism.
Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.

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“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” — 634 people liked it

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.” — 77 people liked it

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