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The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

Start date: June 1, 2025

Finish date: June 30, 2025

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What Members Thought

Jan 12, 2012 Sasha rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Didion talks about being paralyzed from grief and that is how this book make me feel! Perhaps that is the author's point. I really thought the review below nailed it!

Taken from Kate Kosior's review:
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 mi Didion talks about being paralyzed from grief and that is how this book make me feel! Perhaps that is the author's point. I really thought the review below nailed it!

Taken from Kate Kosior's review:
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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Feb 04, 2010 Charlene rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-as-a-mix-tape

This book would've been excellent for my death and dying sociology class back in undergrad. Funny how I can imagine the unhinging that death causes but not the happiness/connection that leads to one being so unhinged.

One of the best parts of this book is a quotation from another source: