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The Year of Magical Thinking

3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 · rating details · 50,578 ratings · 5,044 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.

Paperback, 227 pages

Published February 13th 2007 by Vintage (first published October 2005)

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May 28, 2007 steffie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition 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.

One pas...more

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Jennifer @ Tonja: Dominick Dunne was Joan Didion's brother-in-law, I believe.
Feb 25, 2013 09:00pm

Alexandra As a widow reading this book, I don't find Didion's detachment surprising or off-putting at all. After my husband of 20 years died on a Saturday morni...more
May 10, 2013 11:32am

Dec 21, 2011 Gavin rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 accept;...more 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 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 5 of 5 stars 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 of a fan of Joan Didion... I...more

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Jul 20, 2007 Sara rated it 5 of 5 stars

"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 learned later that after the book wa...more

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Jan 02, 2008 Kate rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more 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.

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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Jan 24, 2013 Kylee Hill rated it 1 of 5 stars

I read this book because it got a lot of attention and it "seemed" like I "should". The whole time I was reading it, I had a uncontrollable reoccurring thought: "This rich bitch. Rich bitch. Rich bitch." It seemed funny to me after a while. It was hard to read the most sincere sections with an open mind while this was happening.

There is some rumination in this book about the infinite sense of loss surrounding the death of a vital person. There is also a lot of writing about the anger and resentm...more I read this book because it got a lot of attention and it "seemed" like I "should". The whole time I was reading it, I had a uncontrollable reoccurring thought: "This rich bitch. Rich bitch. Rich bitch." It seemed funny to me after a while. It was hard to read the most sincere sections with an open mind while this was happening.

There is some rumination in this book about the infinite sense of loss surrounding the death of a vital person. There is also a lot of writing about the anger and resentment of a rich person with a lot of connections and power being totally astonished that untimely death can and did happen to a member of the cultural elite. She seems to have an inkling of self-awareness on this point, but it's never explored.

She discusses her experience as a smart, rich woman losing the most important person in her life. She discusses doing nothing for months, barely leaving her house, the worry of friends, and name-drops the elite people who cared or were involved with her during that time. She mentions the obituary appearing in the New York Times.

She doesn't mention having any thoughts about the plight of people in similar positions without enough money to stop working, or have professional mental health care, or people without the comfort of having done absolutely everything possible with medical care to prolong their husband's life.

She doesn't have to mention any of these things, because that is simply not her life or what happened to her; but I don't have to find it compelling, or an accurate portrayal of loss and death for me or most people. This book is not that.

Another reoccurring thought I had while reading: "This may be an important historical document for future generations when wealthy people in first-world areas have found ways to preserve themselves beyond death. This may be an important document of the horrors of the early 21st century for rich people."

"This may be an important anthropological document for aliens assessing our society in the wake of The Singularity or their takeover of our planet or just our own slow decline and eventual apocalyptic extinction as a result of global warming/energy crisis/biological warfare or some other fucking shit that could feasibly happen in the next 200 years."(less)

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Jul 25, 2008 Simeon Berry rated it 2 of 5 stars

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 sentimentality. The Wh...more

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Mar 09, 2008 Don rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 forev...more

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May 21, 2007 noisy penguin rated it 1 of 5 stars 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 it now. Instead of saying "ou...more

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Sep 03, 2007 Audrey rated it 4 of 5 stars 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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Apr 21, 2012 Sue rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: bio-memoir, death-dying, read-in-2012

Didion's memoir of the year after her husband's death, and the serious illnesses of her daughter Quintanna, is a gripping read. It moves back and forth through her married life with John, recounting moments of possible foreshadowing of future disaster. She mentions and then documents the unwinding of the mind and spirit after losing a loved one, what happens to protect, to shelter, to then move on. I found much to relate to, possibly to return to at a later time.

I've seen negative mention by ot...more

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May 23, 2008 Samilja rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 roo...more 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 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 3 of 5 stars

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 chronologic...more 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 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 5 of 5 stars

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 first to go. I t...more 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 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 3 of 5 stars

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 identified with this...more 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 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 5 of 5 stars

"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 they are bold and certain...more

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Jun 14, 2007 Dawn rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition 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 me....more

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Aug 08, 2008 Kate rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 2 of 5 stars

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 imagine dying w...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

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 reflected what was going on...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 5 of 5 stars

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 make with yourself afte...more

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Oct 18, 2007 Alan rated it 3 of 5 stars 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 4 of 5 stars

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 low and resonant whisper. She writes...more

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Oct 19, 2011 kissmyshades rated it 2 of 5 stars

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 to have lost acc...more

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Apr 12, 2009 Dorothea rated it 1 of 5 stars

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 Didion's poeti...more

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May 28, 2012 Courtney rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Lovers, Wives, Widows

Shelves: 2012, non-fiction, summer-2012

In a literature class my first semester at UF, I read the essay "The White Album" and absolutely loved Didion. She was poignant, insightful, wonderfully poetic but not so much so that it seemed forced. But The Year of Magical Thinking honestly fell flat for me.

Throughout the story, she tells about the specifics of her husband's cardiac arrest at least 15 times. The details of the arteries, the procedures, the time declared dead. But even at the end of it, I didn't feel like I knew her husband. S...more In a literature class my first semester at UF, I read the essay "The White Album" and absolutely loved Didion. She was poignant, insightful, wonderfully poetic but not so much so that it seemed forced. But The Year of Magical Thinking honestly fell flat for me.

Throughout the story, she tells about the specifics of her husband's cardiac arrest at least 15 times. The details of the arteries, the procedures, the time declared dead. But even at the end of it, I didn't feel like I knew her husband. She told me about all the swanky, trendy places she went in the 60s with all her swanky, trendy California writer friends. But I didn't really understand her life or her experiences. I wanted more breadth to the story. I wanted something besides vignettes of car rides or one-liners from poems that her husband had liked. That's all nice and good, but it doesn't grab my attention. It doesn't really make me care.

I didn't necessarily think she was "whiny." (I have a lot more patience for whiny narrators than most, anyway.) I just didn't think she was anything. Some parts resonated as beautiful writing. But most of it didn't. Most of it was about hospital visits or the specifics of her daughter's pneumonia, etc.

I "got" the effect it all was supposed to have, I suppose. It all seemed like a personal working-through of her own mourning. The details were important to her. The exact medical particulars of his past and her daughter's past that she told and retold and told again -- I "get" that these are important. But as a reader, they're not that important to me. I'd rather hear a beautiful and heartbreaking story of her marriage. I'd rather hear a narrative. I love vignettes, just not boring ones about hospital pools.

And yes, the name-dropping bothered me. I realize it shouldn't have. In the end, that was her life. I shouldn't be annoyed that she talks about her ton of wonderfully famous and talented friends who she lived-the-life with throughout the 60s. It was her life -- what else was she supposed to talk about in her memoir? To not recognize that aspect of her experience would be insincere. But at the same time, it affected the tone. There's a weird contrast between all of that swanky-famous-friend-name-dropping, and the intimacy of hearing about her husband's blood on the carpet. It may have been better handled in other pieces or by other authors. It didn't flow well for me in this book.

Overall, I thought the whole reading experience was shallow. Not superficial, but just shallow. By the time I had gotten my feet wet, the tide was heading back out. (less)

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Apr 28, 2010 Adrianna rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition 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...more 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 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 5 of 5 stars 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 02, 2012 Carrie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: loss-grief-life, raw-life-and-grit, biographical

C.S. Lewis (apparently among many others) said, “We read to know we are not alone.”

Well, this is the foundation on which I am rebuilding myself piece by piece.

I read Sylvia Plath and knew that I was not alone, trapped in my own mind, not knowing if an escape existed. I knew that I was not the only one afflicted by the panic bird on my heart and my typewriter, hovering over me and threatening to take flight with my sanity and will to live, love, and create.

I read Laurie Notaro, Jen Lancaster, and...more

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Oct 29, 2010 Kristina rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 over, in gr...more

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About Joan Didion

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She's best known 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.” — 746 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.” — 126 people liked it

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