About this title: In THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, Joan Didion writes an account of her life since the 2003 death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Didion's grief was profound and debilitating; she and Dunne had been married for nearly 40 years, during which they were hardly ever apart. But in the course of her mourning period, she also gained crucial insights ...
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 01/2005
ISBN-13:9781400043149ISBN:140004314X
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 227 p. read more
"This is my first attempt to read anything written by Joan Didion. I picked up The Year of Magical thinking at a used book sale, after hearing her name thrown around in literary circles and not knowing anything about her. At this moment I'm only on page 76 and I don't know if I'll bother trying to make it to page 77 as the pretension is becoming unbearable.
The book is a series of essays she wrote after the death of her husband to whom she was married for 40 years. Little nuggets of Didion's poetic insight on grief gave me the momentum to keep going even as her words threw up some stumbling blocks of resentment as I couldn't help but compare her grief over the loss of her husband to my own grief over the loss of my sister. Didion had her husband for 40 years! I only had my sister for 32. What I would give for 8 more! (I realize this line of thinking would be equally offensive to someone who only had their loved one for 26 years, 18 years, 7 years, 7 months, or seven hours. Only eternity with our loved ones can sate us).
Not only that, but how damn lucky is this woman that she loved the man she was married to so intensely and so thoroughly for four decades! I don't even dream of such a love. The chances of that kind of relationship coming into being in anyone's life are so slim as to make imagining it a ridiculous torture devise.
These things I could get over, but when you throw in all her remembrances of trips to Cambridge, Malibu, Indonesia, Beverly Hills, St. Bart's, Palos Verdes and all the soufflés, creme caramels, daubes and albóndigas her husband ate at these places it gets to be too damn much. I don't even know what a daube or an albóndiga is and Didion repulses me to such an extent that I don't have any interest in finding out, either."
"Heavy with saddness and loss, the author's journey after the death of her husband and terrible sickness of her daughter, has resonance for anyone who has suffered a loss. For me, there were alot of"
"What has stayed with me most from this book is her idea of "the shallowness of sanity." We move through life as though our days aren't numbered; death or tragedy shocks us into another mental state. "Sanity" involves a kind of denial of mortality."
"A National Book Award-winner, this book is Didion's personal memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Dunne. Didion lays out her thought processes and emotions and struggle for normalcy after Dunne passes away suddenly one night at the dinner table from a heart problem. I didn't find this book nearly as good as the hype would lead me to believe. The NY Times review called it an "indelible portrait of loss and grief." The NY Review of Books said "I can't imagine dying without this book." For me, it earned none of the preceding words of praise. Books on grief have been done much better, including one referenced multiple times throughout Didion's book (A Grief Observed by CS Lewis is far superior). I am absolutely convinced that the only reason Didion's book received such notably positive press was because she and her husband were good friends with all these reviewers and the rest of the literary community, having bonded with these people at dinner parties on the Upper East Side in smoking jackets with martinis and cigars; Didion and Dunne were part of the NYC writing establishment Didion's prose throughout is tight and reminiscent of early Vonnegut (his self-referencing style, not his humor), but there is an emotional distance in her writing. She quotes numerous studies on grief throughout the book, having spent the months following the tragedy not only grieving but studying grief. But the research studies don't serve to illuminate her grief; they serve to distance us from her grief. Secondly, Didion lived a very upper-crust NY life, and the way she describes the events she will miss doing (dining at Morton's with her husband, walking on the Jardin du Ranelagh in Paris with her husband, skipping the Monet exhibit to dine at Conti's with her husband) further distances me from Didion's grief. Personally, I don't find rich people experiencing tragedy as tragic as I would find average people experiencing tragedy. I found this too emotionally detached to recommend it."
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