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