Title: The Year of Magical Thinking
Author: Joan Didion
Genre: Memoir, autobiography, non-fiction
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Publication Date: October 5, 2005
Format: Audiobook
Length: 5 hours

Read if you like: stories of grief and mourning, journalistic writing, trying to make sense of tragedy, processing of trauma, research on grief

Rating:

Sometimes a book comes to you at exactly the right time, and this is how I felt about The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. I’ve long had Didion’s works on my TBR, but in a fit of pure coincidence, my long-term hold for this book came in from my library right in the midst of an uncommon season of grief. While her account of her own mourning was difficult to listen to, it was also, in some ways, therapeutic.

Didion’s works are classics for a reason, and The Year of Magical Thinking was no exception. Poignant, analytical, and surprisingly emotional, this story of grief and mourning was so relatable I had to stop reading it at times just to process. I can’t think of a better account of what it means to deal with a death that is so close to your soul, and this is certainly a memoir I’ll be recommending to those who may be walking through these seasons themselves.

The Book Synopsis: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

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 daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year’s Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

The Review

What a phenomenal book.

I loved Didion’s almost clinical approach to grieving, probably because I feel like my own process is somewhat similar. In trying to walk through the very sudden death of her husband, while simultaneously dealing with a critical illness for her daughter, Didion spends much of the book looking at the hard facts of the circumstances of her husband’s death alongside her own experience of it. She struggles to wrap her head around the basic facts of the events because, in her grief, it’s difficult to understand how such a monumental shift in her world can be so clinically explained. She understands the mechanics of everything that’s happened, but her ability to move on, to understand her role or her husband’s awareness or understanding of what was happening is a constant source of reflection. It’s unbearably difficult to accept when a loved one has moved on, and Didion does such a remarkable job of outlining the surrealness of what it is to be left behind, to be responsible for continuing to live your life as if this great and terrible thing can even be moved on from.

I loved the style of Didion’s writing, the way that it’s so journalistic in nature. It makes her account feel much like a fact-finding mission of the mechanics of grief, or the specifics of her particular situation, and then she has these flashes after she’s thoroughly analyzed everything of true and deep emotion, where she actually processes her own reactions and determines that while she’s coping on the surface, there is much work for her to do. It feels as though she’s hoping that through a thorough analysis of her situation that she might be able to find something that will make it all click into place, that will help her to understand exactly why this happened to those that she loved, and while scientifically there are answers, there’s always much left to be unknown in death. Mostly, the unknowns are the hardest because they relate to your feelings, to your relationship with the deceased: did they have some kind of feeling this was coming? Do they remember that event that seemed to meaningless at the time and now feels so important? Do they know that I’m still here, trying to understand why they’ve left me and what I’m supposed to do now?

Grief is such a difficult thing, and everyone processes it differently. I found it immensely helpful to see Didion approach it in such a thorough manner. It felt relatable to me to see someone who wanted every aspect of fact, every piece of the puzzle so that they could quietly analyze and come to terms on their own. I really, thoroughly enjoyed this book, and while it was immensely difficult at times, I think it’s one I’ll likely return to in the future.