Wow. I suppose people grieve in their own way. Joan Didion's way is to write a book more concerned about name dropping every socialite and celebrity she can. I never really got a sense of the kind of people her husband and daughter really were.

"We had gone with David and Jean Halberstam to see the Lakers play the Knicks. David had gotten the seats through the commissioner of the NBA, David Stern". Look, I have nothing against rich and/or famous people. I really don't. But it's details like this that she felt were more important in her little anecdotes than sharing actual parts of her life with her husband or daughter. Given her connections, she probably could have banged on the keyboard with a stick and all her friends at the New York Times and Time magazine would fall over themselves saying "so brave!".

This book is not. I'm sorry these terrible things happened to her. She is a genuinely good writer. But this book is just awful. It's very readable, but pointless.

I expected a lot from this book, but was pretty disappointed. Towards the end I found myself counting pages - how many left to get it over with. The memoir revolves around the loss of her husband a month before their 40th anniversary. Her recollections of a long and happy marriage involved a lot of privilege, a lot of name dropping and exotic destinations. I could feel her grief and much of the writing is clear and beautiful, but not a lot that translates to what others might experience or feel. Some of the best passages were quotes from other writers, such as Auden and Ariés, DH Lawrence, CS Lewis, and even her husband’s “Dutch Shea Jr” novel.

Her idea of a vortex, though, was quite visceral. That there are times in grief and mourning that a thought or a thing triggers a whirl of emotion and pain and reminder of loss that can’t be controlled.

I would suggest looking elsewhere for meditations on grief or how others have dealt with mourning.

DNF
Para quem não precisar de sentir empatia por uma mulher que acabou de perder o marido e tem a filha internada com uma doença grave, este é o livro ideal. Talvez como forma de se proteger, Joan Didion racionaliza tanto que tira toda a emoção à leitura.

I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to write about this book. This is, without a doubt, the perfect book about having your husband die suddenly of a massive heart attack while your daughter is in the hospital in a coma, about to begin her own death-defying medical struggle (one she eventually loses, although that’s outside the scope of this particular book). I thought this memoir was so perfect that it’s hard for me to understand any of the criticisms of it. Are the critics saying there’s only one way to grieve, and Joan Didion is doing it wrong? Or that there’s only one way to write about grieving, and Joan Didion is doing that wrong?

If you’ve ever grieved the loss of anyone, I don’t see how you can hold either of these opinions. Grief does not follow some straight line, where you’re devastated and then day by day you’re less devastated, until one day you’re fine. As this book makes clear, grief is sporadic and unpredictable. It ebbs and flows. There’s nothing logical about it, and trying to impose logic isn't going to help you at all. And so, Joan Didion takes a cab home from the hospital after the death of her husband John, and her first thought is that she really needs to discuss the situation with John. She initially doesn’t want people to know about his death, because it might ruin his chances of coming back. With both her daughter and her husband, she goes over situations again and again, as if by doing so she could somehow change what has already happened. She moves back to Los Angeles to be with her daughter during her latest hospital stay, but finds the streets so full of memories that she must devise careful routes that don’t lead her past any troubling locations that might leave her useless for the rest of the day. She cries to her doctor that she “just can’t see the upside” to the situation. If all of this sounds grim, it is. Of course it is. But perfect.

There seem to be two main criticisms of this book. One is that Joan Didion is ice-cold, standoffish, and unfeeling. She certainly seems this way sometimes: At the time of her husband’s death, the social worker assigned to her calls her “a pretty cool customer.” Significantly, though, Joan wonders what an “uncool customer” would be allowed to do: “Break down? Require sedation? Scream?” Joan wonders this not with judgment, but clearly with a kind of envy: Just because she doesn’t do these things doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to.

Fittingly, then, the other criticism I’ve seen is that Joan is too self-pitying. Joan addresses this in the book as well. We abhor self-pity in our culture, but, as she points out, if you’ve been through a traumatic experience over which you have no control, self-pity is a perfectly normal response. And it is! So I guess the truth is, in this book, Joan Didion is both self-pitying and a “cool customer.” In this book you see quite clearly the struggle of someone who’s kept things under control for years and now finds, late in life, that nothing at all is under her control. How it could be written any other way is beyond me.

"Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life."

In The Magical Year of Thinking, Joan Didion creates a cerebral, searing, and brutal portrayal of grief. Just days before Christmas of 2003, Didion's daughter, Quintana, fell ill and began life support. Then, while eating dinner around a week later, Didion's husband, John, suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In this book, Didion attempts to pull apart the vestiges of her former reality and reflect on her marriage and her family, before she lost her life as she knew it.

There does not exist one right way to grieve. Didion has an analytical, academic approach to her grief, at least as she portrays in it The Magical Year of Thinking. She approaches concepts such as the meaningfulness of death and the castigation of self-pity with unflinching honesty. As someone who has love and lost, I found Didion's approach heartrending and intriguing, even if I myself could not relate too much to the way she processed emotion. The book felt slim, and Didion's writing packs a punch, even if their impact fell in similar ways at times.

Recommended to those who can handle a more stoic and objective representation of grief. Not my favorite book ever, but I believe that some might relate to it, in particular those who find poignancy in the words left unsaid, or the emotions that remain unexpressed.

Didion's memoir of the year after her husband's death, and the serious illnesses of her daughter Quintanna, is a gripping read. It moves back and forth through her married life with John, recounting moments of possible foreshadowing of future disaster. She mentions and then documents the unwinding of the mind and spirit after losing a loved one, what happens to protect, to shelter, to then move on. I found much to relate to, possibly to return to at a later time.

I've seen negative mention by others of Didion's penchant for name/brand dropping. It really didn't strike me that way while reading. These people and items were facts of her and her husband's lives together and were a part of their identification. Their memories were made at fancier places than I inhabit perhaps, but that does not seem to merit a penalty. In this memoir, individual memories are key, whether they are of a particular perfume or tie, or restaurant or movie director. Each thing or person led to another memory which furthered the journey or explanation of emotion. I don't know if I'm expressing what I mean here, so I think I'll end by saying I found this book very meaningful.

i mean i’m fine i’ll just cry myself to sleep for the next few days

Couldn't finish -- too sad. I know, I know, we all die. But this is where I could have used a lot more breast beating, more not so clinical stuff. This is a good argument for why fiction is essential, how it gives context & color...

Przeczytałem o stracie, o chorobie, o bólu, o cierpieniu, o śmierci, o niemocy przyznania przed sobą, że osoba, którą kochało się czterdzieści lat nie żyje. Nie ma jej. Nie wróci. Obudziło się we mnie współczucie do Didion i jako jednostka, która sama doświadczyła straty i patrzyła na czyjąś smierć byłem w stanie mentalnie objąć ją i powiedzieć, że może płakać, że może przeżywać i nie musi zamykać się w klatce. Wszystko kiedyś minie.

To książka autobiograficzna, dlatego ocenienie jej trochę mija się z celem, aczkolwiek mogę zaznaczyć, że pod względem literackim jest to dzieło nad wyraz dobre. Didion jest ze słowem pisanym za pan brat i nie musi się wysilać (choć sama pisze, że jest inaczej), żeby opowiedzieć o tym co przeżyła w klarowny, przejmujący sposób.

Jednak ja do „Roku…” nie wrócę. Ta książka nie była dla mnie. Może to kwestia tego, że nastawiłem się na dzieło uniwersalne. „Rok magicznego myślenia” nie jest uniwersalny. To książka napisana dla literatów i krytyków, a może dla kogoś, kto już tę autorkę dobrze zna (takie odniosłem wrażenie podczas lektury). Jakiekolwiek utożsamienie się z Didion, poza emocjonalnym elementem samej straty bliskiej osoby, wychodziło poza granicę moich możliwości. Przeczytałem o roku życia uprzywilejowanej pisarki, obracającej się w świecie artystów, dziennikarzy i polityków. Nie uroniłem łzy, nie czułem się poruszony, a czasem nawet byłem mało zainteresowany tym, co ma jeszcze do opowiedzenia. Nie odbiorę Didion kunsztu, wrażliwości i wyczucia słowa, ale jest mi przykro, że jednak do mnie nie trafia.

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”



There was a lot to think about in Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinkingespecially about grief and identity. I just felt that the way grief was intellectualized made this grief seem less immediate and less personal. Despite a moving account in The Year of Magical Thinking, it did not work for me. In my view,Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains Didion's seminal work and the one I'll go back to when I think about how good a writer Joan Didion is.

Very interesting document which heavily dotes upon pain, grief, death. Basically, megapersonal, deep, sad stuff revealed to us... for what purpose? To observe, I guess. Bear witness. Some grief SHOULD be shared... Because....? In order to...? Diminish it? I guess it must this: to ultimately give it meaning: to cash in, when the light of life has gone out...

Let a prose powerhouse not go gently into the night. Much must be said and articulated masterfully (entwining ever so gracefully the clinical with the poetic), and so this is surely a rotund success. Except for the type of glamorous life shared by the married writers--it is shown off in every single page. I cannot relate, I can relate to the effort, not to the final product. We get such a shattering view of affluence! The green-eyed beast enters the stage... The last time I was affected this much by the mere privilege of another unfortunate soul was in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Fabulousness gets all spoiled & stuff, gets marred by the whims of fate, etc...

Affluenza truly is killer.

This is the second book my wife has recommended to me about people whose spouses die. If I'm found dead please deliver this review to the police.

There's a clinical feel about it. Not accidentally: Didion goes out of her way to cite research on the effects of grief. She analyzes it. You can feel her standing back from it, trying desperately to understand it. It doesn't engage in the despair of About Alice. This is how Didion, not our mushiest writer but one of our best, approaches the world: she tries to dig in and understand. She's "a cool customer," as a hospital worker describes her at the moment of her husband's death. "What," she wonders, "would an uncool customer be allowed to do?"

So people complain that there isn't enough passion here. At times I felt like the tragedy here wasn't the loss of love, but the loss of habit.

But habit is life, and what Didion is trying to describe is the loss of her life as she knew it. My wife said it well: About Alice is about love, she said; Year of Magical Thinking is about loss. Didion refuses to go through the motions; she doesn't engage in the histrionics we expect. This is not the trappings of grief but grief itself: deep and black and quiet. It's personal and without artifice. None of this mass-produced conformist dreck: this is artisanal grief, produced by hand.