If I had to describe this book with one word, it would have to be 'impactful'. If you only read one book this year, read this book!

I also thought this book was tremendously overrated. In the past, I loved Didion because she was a great stylist and a brilliant structuralist. The title essay of The White Album is probably the best-written essay of all time in my book, followed by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-up" and Charles Bowden's "Torch Song." She has the ability to analyze the personal politics of narrative, and to disclose just how weird and singular her brain is without even a trace of pity or sentimentality. The White Album and Slouching toward Bethlehem are stunning collections.

However, as much as it pains me to say it, her powers are not evident in this book. I admire her ferocious impulse to bare her grief and all its fractal iterations, but, like Donald Hall's Without, her sentences aren't up to the task. The Didion of the 60's would have cringed to hear a line like "In an instant, your life can change" come out of her mouth. The strength of her earlier works rests on wry and ironic asides, radical withholding of psychic materials paired with a dazzling ability to move through a scene, and metaphors and sensations that are as finely tuned as any you would find in a novel. But above all, her strange sensibility: becoming obsessed with urban planning, noting the anthropology of poolside drinks in Honolulu, analyzing forensically how Jim Morrison played with matches. Her concerns and how they conditioned her view of the world and her self didn't remotely resemble anyone else's, I loved her darling, odd self.

Most of these assets are sadly absent in this memoir. Bald statement, lazy metaphor, and sequence instead of artful arrangement are the rule here, and I hope it is merely due to her grief, and not due to the fall one of the great prose stylists of the past 40 years.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a transparent, heartrending memoir on grief.

This book first came on my radar in James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read, but it caught my eye again when I watched the Netflix documentary: Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.

In the documentary, Didion was so articulate that I wanted to hear more. She spent her youth typing out Hemingway’s works to learn more about how to compose great writing. This is someone that I had to know more about.

Joan Didion won the same contest as Sylvia Plath, winning a free trip to New York and a spot as a guest editor for Mademoiselle. Oh how this reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.”

In 1964, Joan marries fellow author, John Gregory Dunne. Two years later, the couple adopt a baby girl named Quintana, bringing her home from the hospital when she was three days old.

Joan and John spend 40 years in marital bliss, finishing each other’s sentences, traveling the world together, supporting each other personally and professionally. Their now adult daughter Quintana is recently married but has fallen ill, fighting for her life in the ICU.

After spending the day visiting their daughter in the hospital, Joan and John return home for a peaceful, quiet night. Joan starts a fire, fixes John a drink, and prepares dinner. As she sits down to the table, John stops speaking, slumps over, and dies.

The Year of Magical Thinking is about Joan’s grief, her loss of her partner and love. She is fixated on that last day. How did he die? When did he die? Could she have done something differently to change the outcome?

She talks about mourning and how the United States doesn’t embrace public grief. In this regard, I wholeheartedly agree. People at my company receive three days of bereavement leave. Three days.

There are a handful of people that I trust in my life. These are the people that I can call at any time day or night. They are the people that if I fall, they are going to be there, right beside me cheering me on and lifting me up, carrying me if I can’t walk. These are people that can’t be replaced or “gotten over” in three days.

Didion mentions how she doesn’t want time to go by. She wants to remember John exactly as he was. This I understand. You don’t want the memories to fade. You don’t want anything to slip. You have to be hypervigilant because that person won’t be there to remind you of the time that you shared together. Someone has to keep the memories alive.

The Year of Magical Thinking felt real, not watered down. If you like feeling things deeply, this is your book.

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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I hated this book. It is the reason I instituted my "100 pages" policy (if it's not promising 100 pages in, I will no longer waste my time on it). So within the 100 pages I did read, all I got from Didion was that she and her husband used to live a fabulous life and they know a lot of famous people. She spoke of the '60s as a time when "everyone" was flying from LA to San Francisco for dinner. Um, no, actually, "everyone" wasn't doing that then and they're not doing it now. Instead of saying "our friend so and so gave the eulogy at my husband's funeral," she said, "The great essayist David Halberstam." What does that add to the story? I found only brief spots of actual grief for Didion's husband and daughter, but they weren't enough to overpower my loathing for the author and her self-importance.

There were many beautiful and moving passages in this book, but there are also some tedious aspects. I feel like a brute for criticizing what is essentially Didion's grief diary after her husband died, but some complaints have to be made. Didion gets too bogged down in the hours and days and minutiae of her husband's autopsy report. Also, parts felt like an academic paper because she kept quoting medical studies -- all part of the attempt to make sense of the autopsy.

Those kinds of details are best left scribbled in a notebook. I would rather have had those pages filled with more memories of her husband and daughter, who was also hospitalized during this time. (And very sadly, Didion's daughter died after the book was finished.)

But it's still a remarkable book, despite the minor annoyances. And I will give Didion the highest compliment I can give a writer, which is that I want to read more of her work.

Sidenote: This is the third grief memoir I've read in about six months, the others being "Love is a Mix Tape" and "An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination." It's been interesting to see how the different writers have coped with a loved one's death. An incident Didion relates is when she refuses to give away her husband's shoes after he died, because she "magically" believes he will return and will need them. There was a similar heartbreaking scene in "Mix Tape," when Rob Sheffield unplugs the landline telephone and carries it around with him, under the delusion that his wife (who died the previous day) is simply lost and will try to call him -- even though the phone isn't plugged in.

The point is that no amount of reading or planning can prepare you for the time when "you sit down to dinner, and life as you know it ends." But these books will remind me to be more gentle with myself, and others, when a dark day comes and we find ourselves carrying around an unplugged telephone.

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

my heart hurts at how true this is. the person missing for me is not my husband nor a significant other but it hurts just the same. every single word written was like a punch to the gut.

grief is hard to navigate. it is hard to encapsulate the overwhelming sadness you feel. the way you do not understand how to navigate the inevitable change in your life - the way you ignore it, pretend it is not happening and that your person will come back to you just as you knew them before they left. not every one person grieves the same, and we certainly did not in every way for a plethora of reasons, but this book helped put words to feelings i did not know i was feeling. helped me realise the importance of memories, even if they are not clear ones, as they will help us move forwards in life. because we live on, even if our missing person or people do not.

pieces of work like this change lives. the brutal honesty and care taken with every word shall stay with me for a long time, even the words i did not relate to. and i hope wherever joan rests now, she is at peace with her beloved husband and daughter.

'I hadn’t been able to think of food for days, so I had sent Higgins out for an hors d’oeuvres platter from Café Provencal. I was nibbling brie and beluga caviar on the deck, watching the sun set over the New York skyline and wondering how things could get any worse when Higgins brought me the phone. It was Gary.
My stomach lurched. Sequoia had collapsed at the bus terminal and been rushed to the emergency room, but there was no word as to what was wrong with her. I had to get to Los Angeles as quickly as possible, but first I had to find suitable accommodations. I called my close friend, Academy Award nominated film director Gérard Lupin.
“Gérard,” I said, overemphasizing the accent mark as he prefers, “Sequoia has fallen ill! I need to borrow your chateau for a few weeks while she’s in the hospital.”
“But of course, Jane,” he said. “You’ve already lost so much. You know, I once said to Jim, may he rest in peace, ‘Jim, you’re inarguably one of the most masterful writers of the 20th Century.’ And he said to me, ‘Yes, Gérard. I am. Second only to Jane, perhaps. I am truly blessed to have found someone as wonderful as her.’”
He paused, reminiscing. Then he spoke again, his voice thick with emotion. “I’m shooting with Sir Anthony Hopkins in Luxembourg (he says hello), but I will do anything I can to help.” He cleared his throat. “But what is Sequoia doing in France?”
“The California chateau, at the vineyard,” I said.
“Ah, of course,” he said sadly.'
That’s an excerpt from my upcoming Joan Didion parody, working title: “The Year of Entitled Thinking”. You may have correctly inferred from the tone that I didn’t much enjoy The Year of Magical Thinking. According to a friend who was able to generate a surprising amount of outrage in response to my disdain, this is because I am “not an adult”, but in speaking with her and reflecting on it for a few days, I think I’ve come to a somewhat more nuanced understanding of my viewpoint.
To begin with, this book is the very definition (by my standard, anyway) of creative non-fiction. Didion tells a very personal story entirely from her own perspective. In fact, the story is really about her perspective, her grief and corresponding inability to rationally accept that John is gone and won’t ever be coming back. She even goes so far as to underscore the extreme subjectivity of the narrative by pointing out a few times where her recollection of events explicitly differs from that of some of the other players. She does, on the other hand, also try to universalize it by citing experts/psychological studies on the grieving process and juxtaposing the information with her own experience, almost as if to say, “This happens to everyone, even Joan Fucking Didion .” It’s certainly interesting to think that this state of grief-stricken irrationality is so commonplace as to be almost scientifically quantifiable, although I’m taking her word for it. The narrative itself seems somewhat disjointed at parts, with Didion repeating herself or not making herself entirely clear, but I think that’s intentional, to better bring the reader into line with her state of mind at the time.
Thereupon sitteth, on an ostentatious, jewel-encrusted throne, my problem with the book, I think. Didion’s a great writer. She almost compels the reader to empathize with her, not just her emotions, but the state of temporary, borderline insanity she finds herself in. I really feel like I have a good idea of who Joan Didion is as a person, or at least who Joan Didion wants me to think she is, and that would seem to be a guiding purpose of autobiographical creative non-fiction. I have sympathy for her, especially having discovered that Quintana also passed away right before the book was published. But I don’t think I like her very much.
This is subjective, obviously. I got the impression that Didion is something of a literary star, inasmuch as such a thing exists any more. From whom did I get that impression? From Joan Fucking Didion, that’s who. I don’t know how to explain it better. I think if she had referred to herself entirely in the third person throughout: “Important Author Joan Didion didn’t have an appetite,” it would have fit my interpretation of her general tone. She name-drops in a way that I find fairly inappropriate given the context. She creates an image of a person who’s certainly living far more comfortably than anyone I know, and I find it difficult to muster that much sympathy. I’m sure there are at least three-billion people on the planet who’d trade places with Joan Didion in a heartbeat, even given these tragic circumstances, because it would mean that they weren’t going to starve or die of malaria or have their arms cut off by a roving gang of soldiers. Is that an unfair standard to hold this story to? Of course it is. But I found it to be fairly self-indulgent and self-reverential. And the fact that she seems to have anticipated that I might react this way and told me that she would have felt the same way at my age, but that her younger self and I are both wrong only strengthens my conviction. Who knows, maybe I’ll understand better when I’m an Old.
I don’t deny that Didion is a talented writer, but she seems to know it too and take herself way too seriously as a result. That is my perspective.

"you sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. the question of self-pity."

i picked up this book and read it knowing nothing more than those two short lines. those two lines which become the refrain of the memoir.

i think i must have been drawn to it intuitively, i needed to read this book when i did. didion's memoir records her thoughts, feelings and actions during the year following her husband's death and her daughter's near-death hospitalizations (i learned later that after the book was published her daughter did die, a fact which is incorporated into the broadway play adaptation).

there is nothing sentimental about this memoir, though it easily could be. instead, the memoir feels like a combination of reading didion's diary and also following her every action. she tells us of every thing she does to try to understand her husband's death and daughter's illness, relying primarily on science for her answers, which she does not find.

this is not a self-help book. it did not teach me how to properly grieve. instead, it showed me how one woman, in her own particular circumstances, handled her grieving, which sometimes included not really handling it at all.

i needed to read this book when i did and i would recommend it to anyone who has ever experienced a profound loss from which you may not have fully healed. this won't teach you how to heal but it may make you feel less alone and less crazy when life as you know it ends and you begin that insane plunge into the question of self-pity.

Like Johnny Rotten said during their last (in the universe where they never would re-form again in the mid-90's) show, "Do you ever feel like you've been cheated?"
I do Johnny, I do.
I feel cheated by this book. I bought it because it cost me a dollar. I wasn't interested in it that much. I finally picked it up to read because I wanted to write a review about how pathetic and whiny it was. I thought I'd say something about how now that baby-boomers are starting to kick the bucket they want a fucking monopoly on death too, as if they invented grieving and no one before them could have possibly grieved like they do. Or maybe point out that we really don't need another memoir about someone dying and the way that the surviving family member found some shallow platitude to be true and now feels the need to share it. (i.e., "Everyone said life goes on, but I had to cry for awhile and then write a three hundred page book making it seem like I was the first person in the history of the whole world to have a parent die before realizing that 'hey it's true', and life does go on especially with the nice advance I got from the book deal. Thank you Random House!!")
But no, I don't get to attack Joan Didion. And part of me so wanted to. Instead of finding her whiny, or annoying, or exploitive or whatever I find that I have quite a bit of respect for her.
Other's apparently have had trouble with some of the name dropping that Didion does. Yes she does a lot of name dropping, her and her late husbands friends happen to be house-hold names (if you're household is bookish, maybe yours isn't, and there is nothing wrong with that). And maybe she does name drop the names of expensive hotels and restaurants she normally at in with her John Gregory Dunne, and maybe some people would rather have elaborate descriptions of the decor of these places then her just saying she ate there, or details about what so-and-so said at her husbands funeral, and not just that he or she spoke at it. But that's missing the point and if she had done that I would have been or so happy because I'd be writing a review right now about the banality of memoirs and their narcissistic egoism that only serves to make the author and publisher some dollars.
Instead Didion is really investigating and putting to paper the way that memory and perception work under the duress of grief. The snapshots of memory of a loved one don't necessarily contain any details about the table clothes of a favorite restaurant, but the place itself, it's name where it was located is a memory land mine of the deceased, waiting to go off and spiral out to other memories at it's mere mention.
This book deals with the irrational element of grief so well. It captures the mundane little things that can emotionally paralyze a person, and it's written from that place which our society would rather not acknowledge and that people should 'just get over', and there is no happy ending to the book, there is no climatic cathartic moment.
I've lost where I was going I think. Oh well.

This is my first attempt to read anything written by Joan Didion. I picked up The Year of Magical thinking at a used book sale, after hearing her name thrown around in literary circles and not knowing anything about her. At this moment I'm only on page 76 and I don't know if I'll bother trying to make it to page 77 as the pretension is becoming unbearable.

The book is a series of essays she wrote after the death of her husband to whom she was married for 40 years. Little nuggets of Didion's poetic insight on grief gave me the momentum to keep going even as her words threw up some stumbling blocks of resentment as I couldn't help but compare her grief over the loss of her husband to my own grief over the loss of my sister. Didion had her husband for 40 years! I only had my sister for 32. What I would give for 8 more! (I realize this line of thinking would be equally offensive to someone who only had their loved one for 26 years, 18 years, 7 years, 7 months, or seven hours. Only eternity with our loved ones can sate us).

Not only that, but how damn lucky is this woman that she loved the man she was married to so intensely and so thoroughly for four decades!

These things I could get over, but when you throw in all her remembrances of trips to Cambridge, Malibu, Indonesia, Beverly Hills, St. Bart's, Palos Verdes and all the soufflés, creme caramels, daubes and albóndigas her husband ate at these places it gets to be too damn much. I don't even know what a daube or an albóndiga is and Didion repulses me to such an extent that I don't have any interest in finding out, either.

So raw and beautiful. Would probably revisit this book later on in my life once I’ve done a little more living and learning ❤️

Nie trafiła do mnie. Trudno jest mi ją także oceniać przez jej autobiograficzny charakter.