The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner

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 ...read more

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 ...read more

A beautiful memoir of how Didion experienced the death of her husband. I read Blue Nights first and now I wonder if I need to revisit Blue Nights, because apparently Quintana had not yet passed away when this book came out.

I looked up the timeline. In 1964 Joan and John got married, and in 1966 they adopted Quintana. Quintana got married in July 26, 2003. Shortly thereafter, Quintana fell into a coma from sepsis a virus or bacteria, and during th...read more

"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends"

I've been meaning to read this for years. I love Joan Didion, a love that started in college in my creative non-fiction writing workshops. I've been putting off this book as I remember picking it up in 2011 or 2012 and feeling emotional right from the beginning. It sat on my shelf, an emotional piece that I did not have a specific reason to feel emotional about...then my mom died. How was I...read more

This may need to have trigger warnings. The exploration of grief may cause issues for others who have been through it previously. Prose phenominal. As always, perspectives the author brings are unique, and make me question my approaches to life, or make we want to open my eyes more to the whole breadth of humanity.