Will I love The Year of Magical Thinking?

A friend recommended this book to me when I was blogging about my Dad’s death. I took his advice and I’m glad I did.

In the wake of my dad dying, I felt disjointed from the world, and it felt as if nothing was real, as if I was living in an altered reality.

In reading The Year of Magical Thinking, I was able to take comfort from Joan Didion. Even though her circumstances were different, I was able to relate to her experience.

I’ve been an insatiable fan of Joan Didion’s way with words. Her writing style has always made me feel like I’m simultaneously stepping into a dream world and the cold hard reality at the exact same time.

The Year of Magical Thinking was no different. Didion’s grief following the sudden death of her husband is palpable, and witnessing her navigate that first year without him reminded me that we can be overcome with the hardest emotions and still find a way to press forward.

I went into reading this book to help me learn about memoir writing, and I left the book in awe of how raw and real it was when dealing with a topic like the death of a loved one. It is a great example of how memoirs can reach every reader through the relatability of experiences, even when our experiences can never (and will never) be exactly the same.

Didion made me feel the deep grief with her over the loss of her husband, yet she also pulled me into her shifting cognitions and beliefs about how life carries on… show more.

Joan Didion’s book is heralded for its bravery, clarity, and confessional witness about grief and loss. Indeed, it’s all these things, but for me, more importantly, this book paints a masterful depiction of the loss of innocence that comes when you lose something meaningful—like a loved one.

Particularly, it shows, with exhilarating force, the fragmented sense of time of such an experience, moving from Didion’s darkest moments of despair at the loss of her husband in the present to treasured memories of her life before his passing and musings about what comes now—in the future.

This book is not… show more.

I read Didion’s book a few months after my dad died. People told me it was “hard” and “intense,” but the book only made me feel held.

With its repetitions and circling, it emulates the grief mind, the way we are always returning to what happened in an effort to comprehend the incomprehensible. Didion looks straight at the absence that she must live with for the rest of her life, the death of her husband. Through its looping prose, her searching memoir exposes the way grief rewires us.

In a time when I felt disconnected from the world, reading this… show more.

This book, by the late American essayist, Joan Didion, will not be a surprise choice for many people who are looking for a companion to not just guide them through the grieving process but also to reassure them that they are not going crazy.

I was disheartened in March 2022 when I learned that prolonged grief had been added to the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health) and classified as a mental disorder. There is no uniform end date on normal grief and The Year of Magical Thinking exquisitely underscores this idea.

Charting her own journey after her… show more.

We all know Joan Didion. If you don’t, you’re about to.

Throughout this book, Didion unpacks how traumatizing and life-altering grief of a close loved one can be. Her words are like a warm hug through the pages, for those of us going through the same or similar things.

She explains how grief can suck the joy from a once healthy mind, explaining how to come to terms with what once was and what must be.

While your daughter is hospitalized, on the brink of death, your husband dies suddenly. How do you make sense of it all?

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion iteratively revisits the events that occurred over the few days before and after her husband (the writer John Dunne) suffers a cardiac arrest as she explores the notion of illness, grief, and our medical system.

This book taught me about how my own patients and their families navigate death, and prepared me for when my own father died.

I grew up hearing Joan Didion’s name but didn’t start reading her until I was an empty nester, and felt so late to the party. When she died in late 2021, the world lost a great American writer. This book has been described as “achingly beautiful” and I can’t improve on that.

Joan takes us on a candid and unforgettable healing journey. She shares with heartbreaking honesty about her beautiful marriage, the death of her husband, and the life they had together, then shows us ways to stay human, to look for beauty in every moment, and find our way… show more.

Joan Didion was a master of nonfiction. In this book, she talks about the death of her husband and the illness of her daughter who predeceased her too. It's about loss but also about the fragility of life, how precarious and precious it is. There is a slight detachment in her writing but there is a huge amount to learn here.