The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner

Don’t wait. Read it.
Moving, engaging, thoughtful, clear.

Finally read this
I’m not sure what I expected after all the rave reviews but it was not this memoir. I have not read Didion’s work before but am now curious to read more. Such skill with words. The words in the book told a story and seemed to parallel her own emotional journey through the year after her husband’s sudden death. I will one day need to revisit this with to savor it more.

Authentic glimpse into her life…I recommend
Joan begins this memoir of the year after the death of her husband with the following;Life changes fast.Life changes in an instant.You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.The question of self-pity.She then grapples with the “how” and “why” of these statements and recreates the year after her husband’s sudden death at their dining room table, immediately after they had returned from visiting their daughter, Quintana, who lay in a coma in ICU. I think Didion did a wonderful job of this telling – leading us through her journey of questions – reflecting back on seemingly random conversations – and exploring her emotions and psychological struggles as she was going through them. Joan explores her grief through reading and finding out everything she can about what went wrong with her husband and by recreating and reliving that night minute by minute and the weeks and days leading up to his sudden death by heart attack. Many times she reflects the moment with a minus countdown to the date (e.g. twenty three days before life changes, etc).There were moments of raw emotion, but in some ways the memoir seemed constrained and guarded to me. I think one of the things that made it feel conflicting in this manner was the recency factor – she is writing these thoughts within the year of his passing and not reflecting back years later…but writing in the moment. She ends the memoir only a year and week after his passing. This recency factor probably kept some of the grief from entering the book, while at other times allowing it to come out in ways that would have been lost over time. I think she did an authentic job of opening up the curtains and allowing us to peer into their relationship and life. While her life is very different than mine, she was very human and the window into her life was appreciated and something I embraced. I would not have wanted her to recreate her life for the “common reader”. I appreciate that she was genuine in giving us a window into her life and in doing so, we were also able to catch glimpses into her soul and who she is as a person.I especially appreciated the window into the forty year marriage she shared with John and their partnership – their always working together and the true friendship the seemed to have. From editing each other’s articles and books to their travel together. Joan writes that, “marriage is memory, marriage is time.” I found myself reflecting on my own marriage and how we truly have time and memory together that no one else has. We have history and this is something that can never be replaced. I’ve known my wife like no one else since she was eighteen and she has known me as well over the past two decades. I see her both as she was at twenty and as she is at almost forty. It’s a wonderful perspective that can only truly be had through the partnership and friendship of marriage or long-term partnership. Where will we be after forty years together and will we be able to look back at a partnership and friendship such as Joan and John shared? I hope so and having shared a glimpse into their relationship I will work harder at ensuring mine lasts.In glancing at a few of the other reviews I see some are irritated by what they perceive as pretentiousness and name dropping. I disagree. Authenticity is something that I appreciate in memoirs and Joan shared from her experiences and her life. Each of us is on a different path and journey and the wonderful about memoirs is getting a glimpse into someone else’s story. I think she opened up and shared her story and while it is different than yours or mine, cutting out the fact that they jetted off to Hawaii or Paris to “escape” stress or that they ate out regularly or had wonderful dinner parties with celebrities and other authors would have been attempting to censor her life and would have not been authentic to who she is as a person.Overall, the book was very well written and tightly crafted. I didn’t particularly care for all of the details around her medical research, but it was her way of dealing with the grief and finding answers and I think it gave the book it’s structure and context. I would have appreciated more flashbacks to their forty years together, but this wasn’t a memoir of their marriage, but a memoir of the year of grief following his passing, so I think what she wrote worked well in that context.I’m looking forward to discussing this in our memoir book club next week.

La narrativa enigmatica de Didion nos invita a lo más íntimo de su relación y de su duelo.Llegó un poco maltratado.

She is a wonder of a writer. Unafraid, connected and able to draw comparisons and thoughts across many subjects. This books charts the messy nature of love and mutual dependence in long-term relationships and how grief is something you grow around but never really goes away.