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my_plant_library's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Medical content, and Grief
Moderate: Chronic illness
bookgirllife's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.25
To say this book was moving and powerful is an understatement. Joan Didion processes her grief in a brutally human way through the course of The Year of Magical Thinking. I had this one on my TBR for quite a while. After many recommendations, all I can say is that it was worth the hype. Didion deconstructs her grief following the death of her husband many times over in order to process the ways in which she struggled to process. The Year of Magical Thinking forced me to deconstruct everything I believed about loss and our natural responses to it, or the lack thereof.
I had heard many wonderful things about Didion’s writing prior to reading this book, but none of it prepared me for the very physical experience of reading this book. Didion writes from a deeply intimate and transparent perspective, even as she explores the medical and psychological side of grief. In The Year of Magical Thinking Didion ruminates on her loss as she tries to come to terms with it. The way she does this is not linear, is not through a five (or seven) step process. “Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life” as Didion wrote in this book, and that is exactly how she writes about it. Those waves are felt through her writing, with a slow rise as she endevours to understand grief, the suddenness of feeling the loss in startlingly ordinary moments, the regression into her “magical thinking.”
While grief is an overarching, sometimes all-consuming, sometimes entirely (and intentionally) neglected, theme in The Year of Magical Thinking, motherhood was another strong theme. In particular, mothering through grief while her child was chronically ill. Didion portrays the challenges of continuation without her husband with great vulnerability. It made me think about how my mother would say, following the death of her parents, how she could only go on because she had her children to take care of. It made me think of the necessity for distraction in order to move forward.
I was struck by her insights into the act of grieving viewed as self-pity and the loneliness of grief. She also wrote on the subject of feelings of betrayal and guilt of bereavement, and also on the meaninglessness of death. We try to find some solace in meaning, in things happen for a reason. It is difficult to reconcile that sometimes, there is no reason. It's just what happened. It didn't serve any greater purpose and you're left trying to make peace with that while making peace with your loss.
I found The Year of Magical Thinking to be very interesting, which feels weird to say about someone else’s grief. Didion wrote this book because it's what she had to do to process her grief, to mourn her husband. I am eager to read more Joan Didion in the future after this as an introduction to her work.
I had heard many wonderful things about Didion’s writing prior to reading this book, but none of it prepared me for the very physical experience of reading this book. Didion writes from a deeply intimate and transparent perspective, even as she explores the medical and psychological side of grief. In The Year of Magical Thinking Didion ruminates on her loss as she tries to come to terms with it. The way she does this is not linear, is not through a five (or seven) step process. “Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life” as Didion wrote in this book, and that is exactly how she writes about it. Those waves are felt through her writing, with a slow rise as she endevours to understand grief, the suddenness of feeling the loss in startlingly ordinary moments, the regression into her “magical thinking.”
While grief is an overarching, sometimes all-consuming, sometimes entirely (and intentionally) neglected, theme in The Year of Magical Thinking, motherhood was another strong theme. In particular, mothering through grief while her child was chronically ill. Didion portrays the challenges of continuation without her husband with great vulnerability. It made me think about how my mother would say, following the death of her parents, how she could only go on because she had her children to take care of. It made me think of the necessity for distraction in order to move forward.
I was struck by her insights into the act of grieving viewed as self-pity and the loneliness of grief. She also wrote on the subject of feelings of betrayal and guilt of bereavement, and also on the meaninglessness of death. We try to find some solace in meaning, in things happen for a reason. It is difficult to reconcile that sometimes, there is no reason. It's just what happened. It didn't serve any greater purpose and you're left trying to make peace with that while making peace with your loss.
I found The Year of Magical Thinking to be very interesting, which feels weird to say about someone else’s grief. Didion wrote this book because it's what she had to do to process her grief, to mourn her husband. I am eager to read more Joan Didion in the future after this as an introduction to her work.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief
Moderate: Chronic illness and Death
dudette's review against another edition
emotional
informative
sad
fast-paced
3.0
Not exactly what I imagined. Half of the book is about her daughter's illness which is tragic and I understand that it all happened in the "year of magical thinking" but I was more interested in the mourning process. The other half about marriage and life was more powerful and I wished for more of it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent, Grief, Medical content, Death, and Chronic illness
Minor: Murder and Suicide
deenmachine's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
3.0
My first intro to Joan Didion. Some nuggets of wisdom about grief in here. For me it was not a life changing book. It's a relic of its time and reflects a lot of class privilege (flying from LA to Sac for dinner! Not selling a house in Malibu before buying another one in New York! Going to Hawaii to "think"!)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Chronic illness
rzh's review against another edition
emotional
informative
sad
slow-paced
3.75
"I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted. "
"This will not be a story in which the death of the husband or wife becomes what amounts to the credit sequence for a new life, a catalyst for the discovery that (a point typically introduced in such accounts by the precocious child of the bereaved) “you can love more than one person.” Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time. “She didn’t know the songs,” I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience. "
This was a really interesting read and very different to anything I've read before. This, coupled with the fact it is a personal memoir, makes it very difficult to review. I've not read anything long-form by Didion before and I found I really like her style. I am very drawn to books that deal with memory in a tangible sense of objects/paraphernalia and this certainly does that. I was perhaps a bit confused by the seemingly endless scope for detail in some areas and vagueness in others: though obviously I know this is a book about her husband John's death, the first half or so of the book seems to deal a lot with Didion's daughter Quintana's ongoing illness and then seems to completely forget about it by the second half of the book. The occasional forays into medical jargon and lengthy quotes from journals and studies were perhaps a bit alienating: they didn't lend themselves to the personal reflective style throughout the rest of the book, and yet weren't extensive enough to transform the book into investigative journalism. I do appreciate however that this paints a picture of her obsessive, manic searching for answers after her husband's death. The meditative layering of time, of phrases, of memories of years spent with her husband reminded me of a quote from Anne Carson in her poem "The Glass Essay":
This was a really interesting read and very different to anything I've read before. This, coupled with the fact it is a personal memoir, makes it very difficult to review. I've not read anything long-form by Didion before and I found I really like her style. I am very drawn to books that deal with memory in a tangible sense of objects/paraphernalia and this certainly does that. I was perhaps a bit confused by the seemingly endless scope for detail in some areas and vagueness in others: though obviously I know this is a book about her husband John's death, the first half or so of the book seems to deal a lot with Didion's daughter Quintana's ongoing illness and then seems to completely forget about it by the second half of the book. The occasional forays into medical jargon and lengthy quotes from journals and studies were perhaps a bit alienating: they didn't lend themselves to the personal reflective style throughout the rest of the book, and yet weren't extensive enough to transform the book into investigative journalism. I do appreciate however that this paints a picture of her obsessive, manic searching for answers after her husband's death. The meditative layering of time, of phrases, of memories of years spent with her husband reminded me of a quote from Anne Carson in her poem "The Glass Essay":
"Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down
into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.
I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape—here we go fast around the last corner
up the hill to his house, shadows
of limes and roses blowing in the car window
and music spraying from the radio and him
singing and touching my left hand to his lips. "
Overall I enjoyed reading this. Didion has a beautifully evocative and tender way of painting relationships and memories, though I felt the book began to meander by the end and then simply tailed off (though I suppose grief doesn't really have an "end" as we would like it to). 3.75 stars
Overall I enjoyed reading this. Didion has a beautifully evocative and tender way of painting relationships and memories, though I felt the book began to meander by the end and then simply tailed off (though I suppose grief doesn't really have an "end" as we would like it to). 3.75 stars
Content Warnings
Graphic: Chronic illness, Death, Grief, Medical content, and Terminal illness
reading_ladies_blog's review against another edition
reflective
sad
slow-paced
3.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Chronic illness, Death, and Grief
daniellekat's review against another edition
emotional
sad
slow-paced
4.0
The writing was so beautiful and honest. I could really get a sense of the grief the author was dealing with. At times the disjointed-ness of the the storytelling left me a bit confused (is this moment a memory, a fantasy, something from a book?) but I think overall it added to the absent, unconscious thought stream she was experiencing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content, Death, and Grief
Moderate: Chronic illness
buntatamilis's review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Chronic illness
emmadeadmn's review against another edition
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Grief, and Chronic illness
hannahlouise_'s review against another edition
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.75
“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, wired so that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.”
One of the most beautifully written books I’ve read in a long time, a perfect elegy to Didion’s husband and a reminder of her incredible writing and wonderful mind.
One of the most beautifully written books I’ve read in a long time, a perfect elegy to Didion’s husband and a reminder of her incredible writing and wonderful mind.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Chronic illness, Death, Grief, and Terminal illness
Moderate: Medical content
Minor: Abortion, Blood, Death of parent, Drug use, Pregnancy, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and Suicide