The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

Perhaps it’s because I’m getting older and grappling with mortality more each day, but there was a startling resonance to this that struck an unexpected chord in me. The intimate rendering of such an acute experience of grief and mourning (or the denial of both), as well as how such a loss can impact one’s identity, was deeply powerful. Didion’s prose is stunning, and her poignant exploration of her marriage, motherhood, and sense of self in the midst of such a painful year was both beautiful and brutal.

“You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

Achingly beautiful and haunting.

Everytime I felt this book going somewhere, it just didn't. I read the whole thing waiting for Joan to break through this pretentious veneer and tell me something that would hook me - but everytime she was about to get to something interesting it reverted to her incessant need to name drop and reminisce on the ridiculously privileged life she used to lead.
I wish I could have like this book more, but it just failed to connect with me at all.

I sought out this book in the belief that I could learn from her grief.
Yet what I experienced was a wall of affluence that kept me at a distance.
Somewhere in there is the pained little naked animal bursting with love and loss.

I read this book without knowing what it was about. I'd heard of Joan Didion and somehow wound up reading this book. Probably not the place to start, if you're generally interested in her writing. But as a reflection on a core aspect of the human experience, this is a remarkable book.

As the author explores her husbands death and her own emotions about it, I slowly asked myself whether I could read such a depressing book. However, by the time I finished my run (audiobook) I had no choice but to finish it. The author both fully lives the experience (you can feel the emotion on each page) and also analyzes the experience, providing useful ways of thinking about what she is going thru.

There are no answers here. Only curiosity and feeling. I suppose some of the negative reviews focus on that. Sheryl Sandberg's Plan B - a sort of instruction manual for grief - may be a better option for some folks.

But I don't think death and grief get answers. I think at best you can become aware of how they affect you and live with that pain and curiosity. Extreme events teach us that we work differently than we think we work: we're less rational, society imposes its own odd taboos and expectations.

In this book, Joan Didion leads us on a gut wrenching, illuminating, and painful tour through the year after her husband's death. I can't recall when I was more grateful to an author for writing a book.

Maybe I wasn’t intellectual enough for this one. I appreciated what Didion had to say on the surface, but none of it felt particularly ground breaking to me. That could also possibly be because I am not first hand dealing with the type of grief that she is processing. This could be something that I come back to one day and find more comfort in.

My only real ‘problem’ with it was that the evidence for the title wasn’t as obvious as I wanted it to be. I imagined it to seem more self help and less ‘here is the account of my grieving process’. It was a genuine account that I appreciated, but couldn’t empathize with in March 2022