The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner

Author Joan Didion's true account of her husband's death and the year that followed.

I did end up liking this a lot. My mother lost her parents six weeks apart, and our Rabbi told her that sometimes people who are married for so long end up sharing one soul and one heart, that it's impossible for one to go on without the other. I don't know if that's Joan and John's fate entirely, but I was reminded of that several times as she was narrating her year after her husband's sudden death. I was also reminded of my own long relationship with my boyfriend, how he's also my best friend and my companion in so many ways.

Maybe it's because I'm an eternal optimist, but above all else I saw this book as a wonderful love story.

I felt like there was a lot of rambling and references that made me want to drop this book, but Joan Didion defined and described grief in a beautiful way. It wasn’t until the end of the book where it really sank in. Also, I like the cover having John in blue. I also like how she points out that people view mourning as being weak and how people are expected to get over it in little time. It’s all very real.

“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.