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A review by bookwormellie
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
emotional
hopeful
informative
sad
medium-paced
5.0
TW: sudden death, grief
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
It was serendipitous that I decided to pick Joan Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking as my first read of 2022. I’d been meaning to read Didion for years, and news of her passing galvanised the decision.
I went into this cold, knowing it was about grief in some way but not really knowing. I didn’t know Didion had lost her husband, John Dunne, and I definitely didn’t know he died suddenly, as she turned away for the briefest of moments, of a massive cardiac arrest. The same thing that killed my dad.
A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to continue reading this. It would have been too raw, having almost my exact circumstances play out in writing. My dad wasn’t sitting down to eat. He was at his desk. I wasn’t there when he collapsed, but I found him 10 minutes later.
The way Didion writes about grief, about the bizarre abnormality of the processes around death and dying, about the ways the mind warps and changes to help you try and cope with the loss. It’s everything I’ve been feeling for the past 18 months.
You want people around you, but you don’t, you want to be in charge, you want to know all the facts about the death, but you also leave their shoes where they always have been, because they’ll need them when they come back. Because, how could they not be coming back, in the end?
Didion and Dunne were together for nearly 40 years; he died a few weeks shy of their 40th wedding anniversary at 71. My parents were together for 53 years, married for 49. My dad died 5 weeks before their 50th wedding anniversary and 3 weeks before his 72nd birthday. As well as being a strangely comforting book that helped articulate my own grief, I found myself understanding a little more about how my mom may be feeling to lose her life partner. My dad was my dad, but he was so much more.
This definitely won’t be my last book by Didion. Her writing is engaging and thought-provoking, easy to follow and pointed at the same time. It’s a book I know I’ll come back to when I need the words I can’t say myself.
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
It was serendipitous that I decided to pick Joan Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking as my first read of 2022. I’d been meaning to read Didion for years, and news of her passing galvanised the decision.
I went into this cold, knowing it was about grief in some way but not really knowing. I didn’t know Didion had lost her husband, John Dunne, and I definitely didn’t know he died suddenly, as she turned away for the briefest of moments, of a massive cardiac arrest. The same thing that killed my dad.
A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to continue reading this. It would have been too raw, having almost my exact circumstances play out in writing. My dad wasn’t sitting down to eat. He was at his desk. I wasn’t there when he collapsed, but I found him 10 minutes later.
The way Didion writes about grief, about the bizarre abnormality of the processes around death and dying, about the ways the mind warps and changes to help you try and cope with the loss. It’s everything I’ve been feeling for the past 18 months.
You want people around you, but you don’t, you want to be in charge, you want to know all the facts about the death, but you also leave their shoes where they always have been, because they’ll need them when they come back. Because, how could they not be coming back, in the end?
Didion and Dunne were together for nearly 40 years; he died a few weeks shy of their 40th wedding anniversary at 71. My parents were together for 53 years, married for 49. My dad died 5 weeks before their 50th wedding anniversary and 3 weeks before his 72nd birthday. As well as being a strangely comforting book that helped articulate my own grief, I found myself understanding a little more about how my mom may be feeling to lose her life partner. My dad was my dad, but he was so much more.
This definitely won’t be my last book by Didion. Her writing is engaging and thought-provoking, easy to follow and pointed at the same time. It’s a book I know I’ll come back to when I need the words I can’t say myself.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Grief