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

3.0

maybe i went in with my expectations too high but this didn't hit the way i thought it would. obviously it is sad! and deeply crazy! but any observation of or exploration of grief was relatively surface-level and dare i say pedestrian. i do think that this book probably suffers from being a template which has been copied many times. it also is so distinctly from a different time, where grief was more private. that's simply not the case anymore - open your instagram reels page! 

at some point it grew repetitive. i think this was the non-linearity coming into play, where the book ricochets back and forth between memories, sometimes the same ones repeating. perhaps a formal gesture towards the anarchy of grief, but it made for a poorer reading experience.