A review by cepbreed
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

"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." 

Joan Didion is a master of her craft and yet this book managed to disappoint me. I think I went into this with such lofty expectations. I had my first true conscious experience with grief in May of 2022 and have ruminated intensely on that experience and my reactions to it in the past year and a half. Unconsciously I was expecting Joan Didion to serve me some sort of world-altering revelation on a silver platter. I wanted desperately to understand myself and my grief more and I did not get that. Even though I'm conscious of this that doesn't change how I feel about this book. I can acknowledge this is a chronicle of her personal experience but that does nothing to abate my feelings of discontentment. 

But I truly do want to praise Didion. After reading a couple of her essays I grew to love her style and that didn't change throughout this reading experience. She just knows when to zoom in and out and I am so envious. There's some part of me that is pessimistic. I will never reach that level of intrinsic writing ability and I fear that my writing career ends here. At university I'm competent but in a world Joan Didion has existed in is there any place for me? The other side of my brain is also inspired by her works. Something about the way she writes makes me want to write. That conflict is tearing me apart. 

The only other complaint I have is that she gratuitously name-drops. I understand her life has been star-studded and marked by remarkable experiences at notable locations but at some point it adds nothing to what she is trying to convey. There is no need to know some of these details and the specificity of it all sometimes overshadows the plot. 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings