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The Year of Magical Thinking Posters
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Rating:  -
After reading this book and having dealt with the stress of having one parent in the hospital in ICU and one parent dying of cancer, all I can say is that Joan Didion needs to get professional grief counciling. Psychologists assign points to life events and after a certain number, professional counciling is recommended and she clearly hit that number. It's a lot of stress in one year. I didn't get counciling myself, thinking I could handle it but it boomeranged on me. Writing this book is not going to get her over her resentment on being abandoned by her husband and her daughter. My mother -in-law was a "cool character', in control, etc, but felt abandoned by her husband after he passed away from cancer and it eventually caught up to her and she withered away from depression. I'd advise Ms Didion to accept help even though I'm pretty sure she thinks she doesn't need it.
We read this book in a book club and all of us found it rather depressing. I picked it up to read with no background information and would not have otherwide read this book. I was expecting a story of how a person dealt with grief, not obsessed with it, and didn't give any idea of how to move on at all. I didn't know that "magical thinking" was a code word for mental illness. I'm sorry for the bad things that happened to Ms Didion but don't feel this book was a good idea.
Rating:  -
I listened to this (from the library) and so enjoyed it that I purchased a copy for myself. You can start almost anywhere and get lost in the words. I've recommended it many.
Rating: -
Joan Didion is a writer of great talent, and this memoir setting forth her process of grief after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, is powerful. And while it is not sentimental, it envokes strong emotion in the reader. Didion's pain is sharp, her sense of isolation very real, yet she is able to describe it clearly and movingly. It is a rational discussion of an irrational state of mind. She poignantly describes her fear that her husband will not come back, loathe to get rid of his shoes in case he will need them when he does return, even while knowing that this hope is completely irrational. She deals with not only the loss of her husband, but also with her daughter's devastating illness, often moving through life as though in a dream. She needs, but does not want, companionship. She needs normalcy, but her life as she once knew it has suddeny been taken from her.
Some readers may find this book a bit too clear, too rational. She is indeed as a hospital staff member said, "a cool customer." But this is Didion at her finest. Emotions laid bare. She reveals so well how life can change in a moment, taking from us all the stability we take for granted. She moves between memories of her past life, with her husband and daughter, and her new life alone. This process of remembering and comparing is something that is very painful for her, but it is something she seems to need to experience. She compares her process of attempting to re-run the reel of her life and change it, substituting an alternate reel, to trying to reconstruct a collision, "the collapse of the dead star." A powerful piece of work.
Rating:  -
This whole book describes events and stories throughout the lives of Joan Didion and her family, and it serves as a way for her to express her grief and try to come to terms with the death of her husband of 40 years, all during a year of what she calls "magical thinking."
It's not an entertaining read. It offers some insight on marriage and family, but overall I felt like I was reading something far too personal, a diary of sorts, something that anyone else might write but never publish. Obviously, since it is Joan Didion, the language, the prose, the style, everything about it flows and stops, flies by and slows down in a pleasing rhythm of words, but nothing about the topic is easy to read.
She studies her grief like a med student studies biology, analyzing the various processes that are happening in her mind, causing the sometimes strange and often random thoughts and ideas with which she is constantly struck.
The immediate comparison that comes to mind is with C.S. Lewis' "A Grief Observed," a comparison that Didion points out herself. The difference, though, is that with Lewis' work, I felt like I suffered through much of the grief with him and finished the book feeling a sense of catharsis and ability to move on. Didion's I felt neither of those things; it simply felt like reading her diary. And perhaps that was the point, but in the end I felt that I should not have read the book, and that's never something I like to feel after finishing a book.
Rating:  -
This memoir chronicles the year after the death of Didion's husband. It is an interesting treatise on grief and mourning, if a bit too cerebral at times.
Didion's husband, John, dies from a cardiac event right before Christmas. Shortly before his death, the couple's daughter, Quintana, suffered an embolism which led to her hospitalization. So basically, Didion has to deal with the death of her husband of 40 years while caring for her hospitalized daughter, who is still clinging to life.
Didion had, I thought, many interesting things to say about the death of a loved one - how we never expect life to change so drastically, so quickly. How we can never really know what to expect, how we will feel, until it happens to us. How most of us may think of our reactions to death in immediate terms - the funeral, etc. - but we never adequately consider the long years of absence thereafter, and how we will deal with those. How, despite what our rational mind knows (this person is gone forever, etc.), part of us still hopes/thinks they will return to us, miraculously.
My criticism of the book is Didion's tendency to over-intellectualize everything. By turns this habit was both interesting and tiresome. Having read the book, though, my guess is that this is the kind of person she is. I would bet that, were I to read one of her novels, I would find the same penchant for the slightly pretentious.
At any rate, I enjoyed the book. Not a must-read, but worth picking up if you have some time.
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