The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), by Joan Didion (b. 1934), is an account of the year following the death of the author's husband John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003).

The Year of Magical Thinking was immediately acclaimed as a classic book about mourning. 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.

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «سال اندیشه جادویی»؛ «سال تفکر جادویی»؛ نویسنده: جون دیدیون؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و هفتم ماه ژانویه سال2019میلادی

عنوان: سال اندیشه جادویی؛ نویسنده: جون دیدیون؛ مترجم: نیلوفر داد؛ ویراستار مهدی افشار؛ تهران نشر قاصدک صبا، سال‏‫1397؛ در215ص؛ شابک9786005675351؛‬ چاپ دوم سال1397؛ موضوع سرگذشتنامه نویسندگان ایالا متحده آمریکا - سده21م

عنوان: سال تفکر جادویی؛ نویسنده: جوآن دیدیون؛ مترجم: نیوشا افخمی‌عقدا؛ تهران، نشر کتاب کوله‌ پشتی، سال‏‫1397؛ در240ص؛ شابک9786004611572؛‬

کتاب «سال اندیشه جادویی»، اثری نوشته ی «جون دیدیون» است، که نخستین بار در سال2005میلادی منتشر شد؛ در داستان چند روز پیش از کریسمس سال2003میلادی، «جان گرگوری دون» و «جون دیدیون» دریافتند، که تنها دخترشان، «کویینتانا»، دچار بیماری شده است؛ دلیل بیماری نخست آنفولانزا به دیده میرسید، سپس علائم ذات الریه هویدا شدند، و پس از آن، «شوک سپتیک (نوعی بیماری عفونی)» خود را بروز داد؛ «کویینتانا» به کمای مصنوعی برده شد، و زیر مراقبتهای شدید پزشکی قرار گرفت؛ چند روز بعد، «جان گرگوری دون» دچار نوعی حاد و کشنده از بیماری عروق کرونری قلب شد؛ در یک ثانیه، رابطه ی نزدیک، عاشقانه و چهل ساله ی «جون دیدیون» و همسرش به پایان رسید؛ چهار هفته بعد، وضعیت سلامتی «کویینتانا» رو به بهبود گذاشت، اما دو ماه بعد، ناگهان از حال رفت و تحت یک جراحی مغز دشوار و شش ساعته قرار گرفت؛ «دیدیون»» در این شرح حال زیبا، و تأثیرگذار تلاش میکند، چند ماه و هفته ای را توضیح دهد، که تمامی عقایدش نسبت به زندگی، مرگ، بیماری، ازدواج، خانواده و خاطرات را برای همیشه تغییر داد؛ کتاب «سال اندیشه جادویی»، اثری درباره ی خود زندگی است

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 01/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 01/03/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Disclaimer: Being fresh into the grieving process myself, you may want to skip this review and head onto others. Undoubtedly I'll purge my grief in a review about a book on grief. You've been warned.

Right off the top I will say this for the book: raw, powerful, honest, amazing.
If you have any interest in the grief process, READ THIS BOOK.

The only criticism that I might have is that there's a lot of name dropping. Insert famous names and some fancy locations (Beverly Hills, Malibu), talk about using fine china, fancy bathrobes from some store I'll never set foot in... Normally, that would drive me mad. (rich or poor, like that one book says, everybody poops!) However, I never felt with her that the name dropping was pretentious, or snobbish. The people and places she named were simply a part of her life, so who am I to hold that against her?

Wealth, while it may provide many a luxury, cannot insulate you from death, from grief. Who said death was the great equalizer? It is, truly.

Didion's husband died very suddenly of a heart attack. My mother died (weeks ago) slowly of cancer. Very different circumstances. The link is the loss. Didion writes this about death after a long illness (experienced with others in her life): In each of those cases the phrase, "after a long illness" would have seemed to apply, trailing its misleading suggestion of release, relief, resolution. Yet having seen the picture (impending death) in no way deflected, when it came, the swift empty loss of the actual event.

I mostly agree with her. But in full disclosure, there was relief for me. I would not have to watch my mom waste away for weeks (MONTHS!) in a nursing home. Release? Yes and no. Resolution? No way.

After my mom died, I heard multiple times how very strong I was. What I was supposed to be doing, what should I be saying? Did they think I was callous for not weeping at the funeral? Did they think I was putting on a front? Truth be told, my grieving began 18 months prior, the minute the surgeon came out and told me she had small cell lung cancer. I knew what that meant for her - death. My grief began then, at that moment. It continued each time we'd go to chemo or when she needed a blood transfusion. It continued when she lost her hair. It continued when tumors spread onto the nerves of her arm and she could no longer use it; not to put on earrings, not to hold a cup, not to pick up her grandson. One night, after having dinner at her house, I wept the entire way home, realizing that the number of meals she'd make for me were limited. I knew what was coming. When she died, even though I saw it coming, it was there, just as Didion says, the swift empty loss.

She writes about her own personal grieving process, her struggles to resolve his death in her mind. She writes of how very unique it is to each situation, loss of a parent versus the loss of a spouse. These sentences ring very true:
Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.


Didion writes about the concept of grief crashing or rolling in like waves. Lots of psychologists speak of it. The coping information Hospice sent me also mentioned "waves" of grief. For me, waves isn't quite right. I'll call them grief grenades. Waves you can see, you can hear, you feel them building and you can tell when they'll break. My grief grenades have hit at moments when I least expect it. Examples: walking in the store and seeing my mom's favorite brand of cookies prominently displayed on the endcap. Hearing on the news that 58 year old so and so died after a battle with cancer. Deciding to purge out e-mail contacts, I see her name. Hospice calling on my birthday to see how I am holding up, instead of a call from her, singing "Happy Birthday" off key.

Swift empty loss.

In one part of the book Didion writes of getting rid of clothing that belonged to her husband. She cannot bring herself to part with his shoes, in case he needs them when he comes back. (magical thinking, indeed!)

There were things of my mom's I could not part with. Silly things. For instance, I kept a pair of her earrings that I had longed to throw away for the last few years. They were cheap, old clip-ons, so worn that the color had been rubbed off half the surface. I'd get so pissed when she wore them! Did she not see that they were worn out and looked tacky as hell? However, those earrings I have saved in a small box of other things that will remind me of her. Mind you, I'm certain she's not coming back. I saw her die. I dressed her body. Her cremated remains sit 3 feet away from me on a shelf until we have a beautiful summer day and I can place her ashes into the water at the lake. But I cannot bring myself to get rid of these things: those damn earrings. her favorite coffee cup (bright yellow sunshine cup purchased on a trip she took to Florida.), a potato masher from 1972, the nightgown she wore often in the weeks before she died. a pair of her jeans, ironed, of course, with the crease down the front.

Unlike Didion, who could live among the things that belonged to her husband, I had to empty my mom's apartment. After her death, I immersed myself in this task. Some of it was easy. Trash out. Food that I won't use to food bank. I set up boxes for her brothers, sisters and mom, things she wanted them to have, things I thought they'd like to have as mementos. Then it gets tricky. All the furniture, boxes of clothes, the toaster... I did not want to end up on an episode of Hoarders. I tried to be practical and donate what I could, but there is still a corner in my basement full of her things. (A friend of mine said her garage is still full of her mother's things 5 years later!)

When the last item of her furniture was lugged out of the apartment, I watched them load it into a truck and I sat in her empty apartment and wept.
I wept as I shut the door for the last time.

Didion on the other hand, comes home, sleeps in the same bed, sees his chair, his stuff, always there. A year after she dies, she goes to the chair where he took his last breath, and looks at the pile of books and magazines he'd been thumbing through prior to his death.

How does that mess with your grief process? Does it make it easier? Worse? In my mind as I moved things out I could say I was simply moving her into a new apartment. Magical thinking.

Didion kept her husband's shoes. Magical thinking.

For us, and for those we love who are grieving, it is so very important to recognize and appreciate the fact that we all grieve in a unique fashion. Didion points to literature on proper grieving etiquette, how our culture expects us to behave, even giving us time lines for the process. (be stoic! take a year and then get on with it, already!) Many "great" minds have discussed the process of grief leading to resolution, healing.

It's not that simple.

If I may quote another author, Anne Lamott: "You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."

A year after she loses her husband, Didion has not found resolution. She worries about his memory fading in her mind, of not keeping him "alive". She writes: 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 go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let go of them in the water.

In other words, resolution may never come, but we must learn to dance with the limp.

the only work of didion’s that i had read before this was  the white album, a book of essays exploring the history and politics of california in the 60s - but my favourite essays within it were the more personal ones, the essays where didion moves the curtain to give us a peek into her own life. in  the year of magical thinking, didion completely rips down the curtain, sharing the intimate details of her grieving process after the sudden death of her husband, at the same time as her daughter quintana is seriously ill in hospital.

didion’s writing is a master class in the art of brevity, her exploration of grief cutting to the bone with its honesty and frankness, while her vulnerability allows the reader to follow along on her journey to try and make sense of such a sudden, debilitating loss. as she has been taught to do since childhood, didion takes refuge in literature, analysing grief and citing research on its effects. she desperately seeks the answers for the question of self-pity and to understand grief itself, and in so doing, allows the reader to understand it a little better too.

although the book is specific to didion’s own life and loss, it’s still possible to find relatability within its pages, which i think just speaks to the universality of the human experience. while i personally haven’t experienced the kind of grief that didion explores, i know that the course of life renders it inevitable, but i find some comfort in knowing that i can always revisit this book over the coming years.

For me this book was all about the tension between my hateful, all-consuming envy of Joan Didion for being a rich, brilliant, famous, cool, successful writer with the perfect life, and her obvious point that none of that stuff really matters.

I mean, okay, it is way better to stay at the Beverly Wilshire hotel while your only daughter's bruised and swollen brain and dying body are scalpeled apart by the best trauma doctors in the country. This is better than, say, having your daughter get only treatment Medicaid allows and visiting the city hospital when you finish the second shift at your dead-end job, which you have to go to, even though you're insane with grief and terror, because you're one paycheck away from homelessness. As people on here seem fond of noting, yeah, it is way better to have money during such events, and really it's probably nicer to be Joan Didion, rather than somebody else, in most situations, especially ones like these.

But it still sucks. A lot.

Being Joan Didion and having all her giant heaps of money, brains, and talent, is not currency with much value in the places she travels to in this book, which is part of what makes it such an interesting read, instead of just a well-written and deeply personal description of grief, which, of course, it also is.

“grief has its place but also its limits.”

Didion chronicles her life in the aftermath of losing first her husband and then her adult daughter. She speaks courageously of the familiar, the inevitable pain and the not-so-inevitable perseverance.

Joan Didion’s story is my story.

September 20th, 2021 was my son’s 36th birthday. On September 21st, the very next day, he died in a hospital ICU of Covid.

The term ‘Magical Thinking’ is a somewhat outdated* anthropological designation. It refers to spiritual conceptions of cause and effect. “The rains will come if we appease Krull with a dance” - that sort of thing. (*Any beliefs that weren’t held sacred in western culture were labeled “magical thinking”)

In grief, our rituals are often subtle. Somehow I thought that if I kept Joshua’s number in my phone or if I kept saying “my kids” (plural) instead of “my kid” (singular) then Josh wasn’t really gone. That was my magical thinking. Of course I knew the truth in my head, it was my heart that desperately grasped for the magic.

Six months ago, when Joshua was still very much alive and texting me daily about Sooner football and/or Chinese food (his favorite), this would have been a sad book to read. Three months ago, when I was divvying up his urned ashes between myself, his mother, his best friend Tony, and his beloved Aunt Pam, this would have been an impossible book to read. But now, in the midst of my own year of magical thinking, I find Joan Didion cathartic, helpful even.

I know at some point I’ll be able to say the ‘d-word’ and ‘Joshua’ in the same sentence without wincing, but not yet. At some point Josh will be that picture on my desk and those old HotWheels in my library and thirty six years of memories in my head and nothing more, but not yet. For now I still drive by his house and collect his mail. I still say “my kids.” I still have his number in my phone.

Μιλωντας για αυτο το βιβλιο αρχικα θα ελεγα οτι για μενα ειναι σαν εκεινο το επεισοδιο στα φιλαρακια που ο Τζοι ελεγε οτι οταν εφτανε σε ενα τρομακτικο σημειο ενος βιβλιου,το εβαζε στην καταψυξη για να μην αντιμετωπισει τη συνεχεια.καπως ετσι ειναι η δικη μου σχεση με αυτο το βιβλιο.πρεπει να το εχω στη βιβλιοθηκη μου γυρω στα 10 χρονια και να το εχω ξεκινησει 3-4 φορες και καθε φορα να το βαζω στην ακρη.ο λογος δεν ειναι οτι δεν μου αρεσε.καθε αλλο. Η γραφη της Didion με συνεπηρε απο τις πρωτες σελιδες.ειναι το θεμα του που με εκανε ολες τις φορες που το ξεκινουσα να μην το αντεχω και να λεω "ας το αφησω για μια αλλη φαση της ζωης μου"."οταν θα ειμαι πιο δυνατη, πιο χαρουμενη, πιο ευαλωτη , πιο λυπημενη, πιο...".επισης κανω παρενθεση εδω και σημειωνω οτι το βιβλιο αυτο το ανακαλυψα απο την ηθοποιο Michelle Williams που οταν ειχε ερωτηθει σε καποια συνεντευξη αν υπηρξε καποιο βιβλιο που την βοηθησε να αντιμετωπισει το θανατο του Heath Ledger ειχε πει αυτο.φυσικα μου δημιουργησε κατευθειαν την περιεργεια να το διαβασω.το βιβλιο αυτο λοιπον μιλα για το πως μια γυναικα κυριολεκτικα μεσα σε μια στιγμη χανει τα παντα.ειναι μια απο αυτες τις περιπτωσεις που δεν ξερεις αν πρεπει να γελάσεις ή να κλαψεις ή απλα να μην πιστεψεις πως ενας ανθρωπος μπορει να ειναι τοσο ατυχος.η Didion λοιπον χανει τον επι 40 χρονια αντρα της σε μια στιγμη και ενω η κορη τους βρισκεται στην εντατικη υστερα απο ενα απλο κρυωμα που εξελιχθηκε πολυ πολυ ασχημα..πώς λοιπον ενας ανθρωπος αντιμετωπιζει κατι τετοιο? Πώς μαθαινει να ζει ξανα με εναν τελειως διαφορετικο τροπο υστερα απο 40 χρονια? Πώς μαθαινει να αφηνει το πιο σημαντικο προσωπο στη ζωη του πισω και να προχωρα μπροστα? Το βιβλιο αυτο λοιπον με συνεπηρε καθως ειναι μια ωμη καταγραφη -εως και κυνικη - των οσων ακολουθουν την απωλεια.γιατι λιγο πολυ ολοι εχουμε φανταστει και ισως γνωριζουμε καλα πως ειναι τα πραγματα τις πρωτες ημερες μετα απο μια απωλεια.οταν η πληγη ειναι ακομη ανοιχτη.τι γινεται ομως μετα? Οταν ανακαλυπτεις οτι οσο περνα ο καιρος τελικα τα πραγματα ειναι πιο δυσκολα να τα διαχειριστεις?αυτο το βιβλιο δινει την οπτικη της Didion.χωρις σωστα και λαθη.χωρις υπερβολικες ατακες , χωρις γλυκανατα quotes για το ποσο ομορφη ειναι η ζωη και ποσο πρεπει να προχωραμε μπροστα παρ'ολες τις δυσκολιες.μονο μια ευαλωτη γυναικα που "ξεγυμνωνεται" κυριως μπροστα στον εαυτο της αρχικα και επειτα σε εμας.το βρηκα εξαιρετικα αληθινο και γενναιο σαν βιβλιο και χαρηκα που εστω αυτη τη φορα αποφασισα να το διαβασω εως το τελος.

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.

I finished Joan Didion's acclaimed memoir in the summer, but didn't write a review. By now, you know what it's about: the sudden death, in 2003, of Didion's husband and frequent literary collaborator, John Gregory Dunne, which happened while their daughter, Quintana, was hospitalized with pneumonia and then septic shock.

Didion recounts everything in her characteristic detached observational style. If she can capture everything just so, you get the sense she was thinking, perhaps she'll find some meaning to it. Sometimes the effect is deeply poignant, while at other times it feels cold.

Didion, one of the least sentimental writers around, explores themes of grief, chance and fate with skill and intelligence. Among other things, it's a lovely memoir of a marriage. It's worth pointing out, however, that Didion is writing from a place of extreme privilege. Beyond that, I'll say no more.