I have only experienced the death of a few friends and my grandparents, so I cannot say that the grief that Joan Didion describes has ever been my own. However, her loss of her husband John from a sudden heart attack while simultaneously her daughter Quintana was fighting for her life talked to me very deeply. This is not a feel good, self-help book. It is a heartbreaking and yet cathartic reliving of her first year as a widow. I admit to wetting the pages with a few tears as I read the entire book in one sitting today. The loss of some of my friends hit me hard because I could still remember them when we had spent time together and I regretted that there had been so precisely little of that time. This, in a far more intimate and poignant manner is what Ms Didion describes as she picks up the pieces and moves on. The prose is splendid as many of the themes and images recur again and again as she processes and moves from grief to mourning. I think what moved me the most was the phrase her husband had said to his daughter, "I love you more than even one more say" that Audrey Hepburn says to Sean Connery in Robin and Marian.
For anyone dealing with loss and bereavement, this is a very cleansing read. For anyone coming out of physical or psychological trauma, I also thinking that this book hold valuable insight.

Malo je neočekivano da od svih knjiga koje je Džoun Didion napisala ili priredila od vlastitih tekstova baš ova bude najnajnajveći i za sada najtrajniji hit. A možda i nije. Jer na kraju krajeva, ako postoje univerzalna iskustva, iskustvo gubitka je svakako jedno od njih, a Godina magijskog mišljenja upravo je njemu posvećena.
Godina... nije ni autobiografija ni memoari, već sažet opis prvih godinu dana proteklih od suprugove smrti, koji uključuje ne samo prirodni proces tugovanja već i borbu za život teško bolesne ćerke. Ta dva toka osećanja i postupaka neprekidno se ukrštaju i utiču jedan na drugi; negde blizu početka Didion citira Frojdovu tvrdnju da u sličnim situacijama jedno žalovanjeTM ometa ili odlaže drugo i to se bogami potvrdilo kao tačno u raznim varijantama i s raznim ljudima. Tako i njoj muževljeva naprasna smrt otežava napor da se nosi sa ćerkinom bolešću a ćerkina bolest, opet, usporava i komplikuje prirodni proces tugovanja za mužem.
Prikazi na GR nose haotično razbacane zvezdice, pet, jedna, pet, dve, i to sasvim mogu da razumem. Jer: na jednom nivou, da, gubitak voljene osobe je (nažalost) opšteljudska stvar koju su izbegli samo oni koji su umrli u detinjstvu ili ranoj mladosti, kroz to svi kad-tad prođemo i odbolujemo koračić po koračić. Na drugom nivou: eh, Džoun Didion ne samo da piše s pozicije beskrajno privilegovane osobe već i barem na prvi pogled (koji vara, ali da se ne upuštamo sad u to) blaženo nesvesna toga koliko joj novac i veze s poznatim i uticajnim ljudima olakšavaju život. I bogati plaču! ali siromašne to nekad iskreno izbezumljuje. Na trećem: ova povest je programski centrirana na samu autorku, na njene najsitnije i najtananije trepete nerava; o mužu i ćerki saznajemo praktično samo da su bili savršeni jer su bili njeni, o drugim ljudima ni toliko.
Pa ipak, kad se sve svede, Godinu vredi čitati makar zbog jedinstvenog spisateljskog trika da se piše o najbolnije intimnim stvarima tako da se one sagledavaju s ledenom distancom i uz apsolutnu retoričku virtuoznost. Nemojmo to brkati s gomilanjem prideva i purpurnim zakrpama: Džoun Didion poseduje istinsku veštinu da s minimumom reči postigne maksimum efekta. I kad se Godina uporedi s romanom A Book of Common Prayer, koji se začudo bavi vrlo srodnim temama, vidi se koliko je autorka uspešnija kad ne mora da se bakće s organizacijom zapleta i njegovom mehanikom, već "samo" da nam prenosi vlastite reakcije na svet koji je okružuje.

You might think of me as a cynic.

If you’re being kind, that is. I’m the one that says ’Seriously?’ when being told of some tragic event--like someone would actually make up the horrific thing. I’m the one that views the whole process of death--the telling, the grieving, the service of any kind, the ’after’-- as playing out like I’m in a soap opera bubble. Which camera should I look into when I break down again? Strike one against me.

Strike Two: I've never been much of a fan of Joan Didion... I think it began in college…being forced to read Why I Write and On Keeping a Notebook. I didn’t enjoy being told, essay-like, how I should go about writing. It’s not my thing. That didn’t help that urge to rebel that goes along with college either. My Didion backlash was further proven when Up Close and Personal came out. Wait, you want to add Jessica Savitch to the list? Awww. Hell no. It just wasn’t happening.

Strike Three (??): Maurice bought this for me a few Christmases ago. I winced, like I usually did when receiving a book from him. Must I relive the college debacle? I can’t just NOT read it, because he WILL grill me on it. Buck up, Kim… read the damn thing already. This was 5 years ago and I just recently found it in the back of the bookshelf. I did end up reading it then… and I thanked Maurice time and again for giving me such a gift. Because, that’s what it truly was. Words can hold such extraordinary power..

So, here’s an enigma: Can cynics really believe in magical thinking? What is magical thinking anyway? I mean… yeah, I’ve read the Psychology Today articles, I’ve gone to freedictionary.com. Is it something that can actually be described or do you need to experience to fully get it? Talk to me.

See, because now I’m either going crazy or I’m seeing the signs. I’m remembering in distorted ways… did that really happen or is my head just trying to make me believe… am I replaying the events because I’m looking for clues?

Maurice is dead. I can type that. I can be matter-of-fact about it via keyboard. Hell, I can put it in a damn book review. But, you get me to actually SAY the words and I’m using the ol’ ‘Maurice has passed’, ‘Maurice is gone’, anything but the ‘D’ word. Like it may make it less real.

“In the midst of life we are in death.” Not just some awesome Smiths lyrics… but a common graveside prayer--and the rest? “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Still looking for clues. As I’m reading the first few pages of TYOMT again, I’m struck at how similar the process is:

“ Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks, all those friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates on the dining room table for however many people were around at lunch or dinner time, all those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher and filled our (I could not yet think ‘my’) otherwise empty house even after I had gone into the bedroom (our bedroom, the one in which still lay on a sofa a faded terrycloth XL robe bought in the 1970s at Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills) and shut the door. Those moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I remember most clearly about the first days and weeks. I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them.”

This book is full of this type of sameness. Two peas in a pod, Joan and I. I may not be keeping his shoes because when he comes home he might need them (like Joan) but I’m still hanging on to that bottle of Moxie in the fridge…I’m still wondering if him telling me that morning that he wanted to hear my voice because it soothed him was really him telling me that I should have… what? What could I have done?

Joan has other tragedies… memories that stretch out to before I was born. She is insightful in such creative, tenacious, concise ways that sometimes I just want to curse her for bringing me there… for making me believe and start to question every action/memory/event of the last 20 years looking for the damn signs… because they were there, right?

In the midst of life we are in death. Don’t fucking forget that.

I read this incredible book five years ago but with the death of Joan Didion on 23 December 2021 from complications with Parkinson's Disease, I felt that I had to acknowledge how helpful she was with this book in the grief that I was suffering from at the death of my husband. She made everything right from what I thought of my own unusual behaviour at the time.

Such a slight, rather frail looking woman but within was a determined spirit.

The sentence that has remained with me always is:

…You have to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He [John] told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

Yes indeed. God is looking on this small bird, the sparrow. A fitting end for 2021 ...

RIP Joan Didion - 31 December 2021
___________________________________________________________

n  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. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves”.n

I cannot remember when I was last so moved by a book. It covers a sad subject, that of death with the subsequent grief and mourning periods but it amazed me with its lucidity of a woman who wrote this book a year after her husband’s death. In fact I was not going to bother writing a review but then my mind took over unfortunately.

I empathised with the author because my husband John died nearly two years ago. I kept a diary after his death and reading it now I realize that I was acting in a very strange way. I became very critical of couples who stayed together because they didn’t love their spouse but they were terrified of a future on their own. I also found that I became more sensitive to people who were pained and probably in a way, John’s death which was dreadful for me, was even more dreadful for him. He had gone. He could not return. And this is where Joan Didion magnificently displays her thoughts on how she felt when her husband John of nearly forty years died of a massive heart attack whilst they were having dinner in New York. Her writing is similar to a dream sequence. How could this have happened? Could she have prevented it? And then he was, as she believed, going to return to her. She refused to give her husband’s shoes away. He would need them for the return. She could accept his going with the funeral but then she was asked whether she could donate his organs. She reflected on this but believed that as he was not hooked up to a life support system when he arrived at the hospital that was not possible; obviously they wanted John’s eyes; the beautiful eyes of her husband.

In parallel with this dreadful situation, her daughter Quintana had fallen ill with what was initially believed to be flu, then pneumonia and then she went into complete septic shock. This happened a week or so before the unexpected death of Joan’s husband. But then we gradually learn that he had continual cardiac problems and he appeared to be aware that his own death was imminent.

Nevertheless, with the aftermath of grief, one wonders, what is grief and I can only assume that it is the initial part of mourning. Joan, a year later, realises that her behaviour had been odd and I believe is coming to terms with her loss. This book was published in 2005, a year after her husband’s death and I hope that she has come to terms with this and is fine. Memories will always be there but life continues. What other choice is there? Suicide. So easy to do but it can nevertheless be brutal. I was always so fascinated with Seneca’s suicide.

After a brief interrogation, Seneca was told to end his own life, which he did only with great difficulty. He severed his arteries, but he was so old and emaciated that the blood hardly escaped; so he asked for the hemlock that he had stashed away for just that purpose, but that had little effect either. He died only when his slaves carried him into a hot bath and he suffocated in the steam.

Joan’s daughter Quintana recovered but then became seriously ill a few months afterwards and so life continued with its anguish. Joan was left with the thought that she was there during her daughter’s illness but she would soon have to let go as Quintana had recently married. And what was Joan going to do with her life. I still have the same problem.

And the book ends beautifully:

…You have to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He [John] told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

I had to look this up about the sparrow. I had no idea that it was a hymn and that God continues to watch over us. I like that. It was an appropriate ending to an absolutely mesmerising and wonderful book, not read once but three times. Am I religious? Not in the past but my thoughts are indeed changing.

To call Joan Didion cold or even heartless - true as it may be in the light of The Year of Magical Thinking, this monument to the analytical dissection of grief - is itself a cold and heartless condemnation. We all grieve in our own way. This is hers.

After losing numerous family members suddenly and too soon, Didion then lost her husband and daughter within the span of a year. This book is her cathartic contemplation of that loss.

Heartrending, yes occasionally. Heartwarming, no never. Didion's demeanor is all too cerebral. It is as if she has educated herself above emotion. Certainly it can be said that some educate themselves beyond their own well-being. In this case, we see a mind so removed from the everyday reality of man as to answer "a motherless child" instead of "a nut" when asked to fill in the blank for "Sometimes you feel like ____." The result, when pushed to produce a book about grieving for loved ones, is an academic's deconstruction. No, it is not without feeling, she is still human after all, but stoicism is her strongest suit.

Beyond the almost biting cynicism you get beautiful language, great observations and insights to, let's call it, a different kind of emotion.

I assume, and sincerely hope, she never reads reviews like this. She shouldn't care what snarky assholes think of her work, not this work and not after the experiences she went through that brought it about. One who suffers so many visits from Death should not give two shits or even one single flying fuck what the rest of the world thinks.

“the power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted.”

i will say i found joan didions writing to be very eloquent. this was quite the delve into grief, how time flies, and the volatility and precariousness of life.

“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.”

To be honest, I found most of this memoir about grief underwhelming. I feel a little bad saying that about a book about something as sad and intimate as your husband dying, but there it is. There were some occasional lovely turns of phrase. I also found reading about this rich white lady's unexamined life of privilege to be tedious and all the stuff about the American health care system fucked up but simultaneously not interesting?

"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 them become the name on the trust accounts.
Let go of them in the water."

Joan Didion, in this memoir following her year after the death of her husband, John, and hospitalization of her only daughter, deals with grief. She talks about grief vs. mourning. She recounts memories of her life with John in New York and Los Angeles. She processes these emotions she is dealing with as a widow right on the page.

At times it's slow. She gets into a bit too much medical information for my liking, and it does seem odd when it's such a personal story, but maybe that is her way of coping with her husband dying. But the moments in which she talks about how seeing things, or visiting old places, triggers memories of her early married life with John are beautiful. She writes openly and honestly and with a poignancy that is unmatched in a lot of memoirs.

It's quite a short book, brief, covering one year but really many years--the 40 that they are married--and her journey to finding closure. But there isn't always closure, as Didion says: "I look for resolution and find none." Because life happens and death happens, and we just keep on living.

With the recent passing of Joan Didion, I felt drawn to reading The Year of Magical Thinking where she captures her grief of the untimely passing of her husband, John, and her daughter, Quintana.

What she went through is indescribable.

This book was a struggle. Not because I shy away from the topic of death, but because I could never get over how much of the text read like the navel-gazing of a depressed narcissist, even though just as large a portion of it was a beautifully crafted universal expression of grief – something most people will relate to at some point in their lives.

There was excessive name dropping. Self-satisfied career talk. The decadent life that Joan Didion led for decades. And an almost wilful ignorance of the privilege she experienced, both before and after the tragic death of her husband occurred. Every couple of chapters I was ready to set the book aside and forget I ever picked it up, but then she'd drag me back in for a couple of pages with a genuinely insightful observation on the terrible mental state she was going through.

On a personal level, my feelings for her swung like a pendulum: I don't think I particularly liked the woman, but why should that matter? She's as entitled to sympathy as anybody.

All said, she can definitely write, and the numerous insights on the phenomenon of grief made the book a worthwhile experience.

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started reading this, I had just known it was Didion's most well known work, but I was kind of caught off guard to find out it was about her husband's death and the simultaneous acute illness of her daughter. I'm not completely sure I know how I felt about this. Parts of it I really liked and found moving. I really like the stream of consciousness way it was written and the repetition through out. It really felt like it captured the certain monotonous and obsessive way grief feels. The last line of it confused me and I had to look it up and see what it meant, and I think there's probably no way I would've known what it meant because I don't know much about Christian theology. It felt sort of unsatisfactory the way it ended up and how it plays out but I also think that's very in line with the way the loss of someone essential feels, there isn't clear resolution, just a slow moving forward, of things fading away. I think mostly I liked this one, not sure though if it's enjoyable reading per se and if I would recommend it to people unless they were dealing with grief.

This book of nonfiction .. a sort of widow grief memoir.. written by a living legend who is a master narrative teller.

The losing of her husband the writer John Gregory Dunne over dinner, a heart attack.. one moment you are here and the next you are gone. The haze and confusion.. the ambulance and the paramedics... the hospital and morgue.

Then to make things worse.. her only daughter Quintana slipped into a septic shock.. after a bout of flu that turned into a double pneumonia. In this book Joan focuses more on John and his passing and concept of grief

How grief is fluid
Waves
Eb and flow

The loss of a husband ... yet Joan wants to be professional and distance .. some would say she is cold hearted and not crying buckets

If you are looking for a pure tearjerker this book is not for you .. it’s like grief this book fluid ... ebbs and flow.. just like life