A Cool Customer: Joan Didion's THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

by Jacob Bacharach

Reflecting on his brother's death from opioid addiction, Jacob Bacharach turns Didion's masterpiece into a blueprint for grief and self-discovery

Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Reading Joan Didion's iconic memoir The Year of Magical Thinking , Jacob Bacharach's thoughts are never far from his brother, Nate, who died of an opioid addiction. Although he tries to be a "a cool customer" like Didion, he finds Nate's story breaking through the text, stirring memories of their tight-knit childhood and defying his attempts to find "the truth" about a tragic death. In A COOL CUSTOMER, Bacharach turns The Year of Magical Thinking into a blueprint for grief and self-discovery that anyone can follow. This book is part of a new series from Fiction Advocate called Afterwords.

"Bacharach smartly weaves his family story with a literate discussion of Didion's narratives and cultural position to make a snappy and inviting book you could easily read in one sitting."—Rebecca Foster

Genres: Nonfiction

156 pages, Paperback

Published February 20, 2018

About the author

I’m a writer in Pittsburgh. My forthcoming second novel, The Doorposts of your House and on Your Gates, arrives in March, 2017.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I made the mistake of not taking any notes on, or even marking out any favorite passages in, this when I read it four months ago, so all I can tell you is that for me it was the most powerful of the three I’ve tried from the series. The author re-examines Didion’s work in the light of his own encounter with loss – his brother’s death from a drug overdose – and ponders why it has become such a watershed in bereavement literature. Didion really is the patron saint of grief thanks to her two memoirs, Magical Thinking and Blue Nights – after she was widowed she also lost her only daughter – even though she writes with a sort of intellectual detachment; you have to intuit the emotion between the lines. Bacharach smartly weaves his family story with a literate discussion of Didion’s narratives and cultural position to make a snappy and inviting book you could easily read in one sitting. Indeed, all of the Afterwords books are 120–160-page, small-format paperbacks that would handily slip into a pocket or purse.

[Leyland]

i haven't read "the year of magical thinking" in 4 or 5 years, so i think perhaps i will skip the rating on this one. the reason i read it is because i'm trying to be a jacob bacharach completist, and his book reviews in the new republic are some of the best things i see online, and he's never wrong on twitter.

a short read, and an interesting one, even if it's not doing something you haven't seen before. just worth noting that physically this is the smallest book i've ever read, it's like smaller than my hand

[Matthew Gallaway · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book about Joan Didion's TYOMT works on two levels: one, it analyzes Didion's work and places it the context of her life; second, it shows how the author used TYOMT to come to terms with the death of his brother, which itself is a sad, compelling story. Highly recommended for anyone interested in Didion or in understanding what it means to grieve.

[Jane Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir of the author dealing with the sudden loss of her husband while at the same time her daughter , recently married is fighting for her life in hospital. I enjoyed the writing style of this book. It was an honest portrayal of how you come to terms with a partner’s absence from a life you shared and working through the year that follows