Jun 6

Jun 6 The Year of Magical Thinking

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Knopf (original publisher in 2005), Vintage (currently circulated paperback edition)
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. 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.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

TL;DR Review

The Year of Magical Thinking is the best parts of Joan Didion — shart, unapologetic, perfect sentences — but, by nature of the topic (grief), more personal and less detached. That was a winning recipe for me.

For you if: You like Joan Didion, memoirs, emotional books, or all of the above.

Full Review

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.”

So begins the fourth and final book I read as part of a formal reading group with the Center for Fiction, led by Lynn Steger Strong (who, by the way, was an incredible instructor). I’m so glad we read it last; my experience was so much deeper having read her early work and knowing a bit about her ethos and her style.

This book is a memoir that covers the one-year stretch of time following the sudden death of Joan’s husband, John. He had a heart attack one evening at home and died almost instantly. This happened while their only daughter, Quintana, was fighting for her life in the hospital in full septic shock (which turned out to only be the beginning). Didion’s “magical thinking” refers, mainly, to the illogic of her grieving mind as she lived through a period of time that many of us would dare not even imagine.

It’s hard to say whether this was my favorite book from the class because I understood her style better and could compare it to the other things I read, or if it was because it’s just such a deeply personal work — which, before this book, we never really got from her at all. Probably the combination of the two. Didion’s skill, on both micro (sentence) and macro (whole book) levels, is fully developed here. The result is a moving, profound, deeply powerful depiction of grief. Having read her earlier work, we can see how much the experience changed her (and not) even as she writes about how much it changed her (and not).

I definitely recommend this one, but I’d say to get the full appreciation, it’s worth picking up at least one of her early essay collections before you do.