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    The Year of Magical Thinking
    The Year of Magical Thinking
    The Year of Magical Thinking
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Year of Magical Thinking

    Written by Joan Didion

    Narrated by Barbara Caruso

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack.

    This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness, about marriage and children and memory, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

    With vulnerability and passion, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss. The Year Of Magical Thinking will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife, or child.

    Editor's Note

    Passionate & vulnerable…

    Didion’s passionate and vulnerable memoir is an honest portrayal of coming to terms with the loss of both a partner and a child. A moving depiction of love and loss from one of America’s most famous writers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateOct 6, 2005
    ISBN9781598872071
    The Year of Magical Thinking
    Author

    Joan Didion

    Joan Didion is one of America’s most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.

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    Reviews for The Year of Magical Thinking

    4/5

    422 ratings164 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I loved it. I plan on reading more of her books.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Lovely, achingly hard to read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A beautiful, thoughtful, naked insight into the nature of grief and loss and what it means to try to pick up the pieces after losing someone we love.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      An incredibly sobering experience about loss that I have yet to experience. astonishingly candid!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Didion's passionate memoir chronicles the year of her only daughter's long-term hospitalization and her husband's sudden death. With stark writing and stunning honesty, The Year of Magical Thinking captures the profoundness of a lengthy marriage and the crippling grief of its unexpected end. A contemplative collection of prose which uses memories of her husband and daughter with excerpts from their respective writing projects as a vehicle for expressing her loss. Raw and powerful.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I was sorry to read that some were disappointed in this book. Currently in my life, my husband of 36 years has a terminal illness and this book really spoke to me on a level that I think only reaches those who have been there. She even references reading a book earlier in her life about the loss of ones husband that she felt at the time to be nothing but whining - she was 22 at the time. It's like so many things in life, that unless you also have experienced it, it is truly hard to fully imagine the experience. We can imagine and we can empathize, but we cannot know. I get that she is rich and privileged, but that was not what this book was all about. That is her life. Was this the best book I ever read? No. However, she shared her pain and her thoughts and for anyone in that same spot or a similar spot, it's always comforting to hear someone else put it into words - words we can't always find. I found this book hit home for me - her story. Plain and simple - no preaching, no telling me what to think, say or do. Just her story; her experience. I read it in one day.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      If you can take it, this book is meticulously crafted. Brutal, basic, and beautiful.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A very personal book about grief, mourning, and "moving on." Didion's daughter is in the hospital in grave condition when Didion's husband, John, dies suddenly at the dinner table. Her daughter goes into a coma, gets better, gets worse, and Didion tries to deal with this while accepting the fact that she is a widow after forty years of marriage. The book is not sentimental, which I applaud Didion for achieving while addressing such a serious, emotional topic. She references equal amounts of medical research and poetry, and her writing at times mirrors both. Still, it leaves a huge impact. There were times when I started crying just imagining having to deal with a portion of what she was going through. Powerful and well-written.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      It was okay but God, I really hated the music.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Made me want to die before my wife does.


      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      excruciating, made even more so with her strange aloofness which is in all her prose. disturbing and affirming.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I've wanted to read this for a while. I haven't read any of Ms. Didion's other works, but this felt compelling. My sister had a copy at her house, which I was visiting this past week, so I borrowed it, reading it in a couple of days and finishing it on a particularly turbulent flight home. As I read the pages of her working through attempts to make sense of the fact that her husband was dead, I recognized a bit of dark humor in the thought that if this plane doesn't make it home, the last thing I will have read will have been about death.

      It's an interesting book. It felt like a personal journal, and to a degree it is. It's a very intellectual journal, filled with quotes from literature I haven't read, allusions to culture that I can't relate to. It somehow manages to be a meditation on grief without being particularly sad, and I mean that in a positive way. The book isn't filled with pages where the reader must hold back tears (at least, a reader who hasn't experienced that kind of loss - widows, widowers and parents who have lost children might disagree), it is instead filled with a bit of that stream-of-consciousness that you might expect from someone trying to figure out exactly what has happened, and what they might have done to precipitate it.

      I don't know if it’s a book for someone who has recently lost someone; it might be helpful to recognize things they themselves are experiencing. But I do think it’s something that we all can benefit from reading, filled with some information to be filed away to help start to understand when people we care about lose people they care about.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A moving account of the raw feelings after the death of a beloved life partner. Not at all self-pitying - read it and contemplate.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Harrowing, fascinating, name-dropping, odd view into a year of hell.Great premise, but felt as if the aspects with the daughter were strangely held at arm's length. Understandable in the moment and surely true, but odd given the intimacy of the story.I have been haunted, ever since, by the stack of books by Didion's bed that her husband had been reading, that stayed in place. For some reason that detail has lasted in my mind with great poignancy and foreboding.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Being highly interested in the grief process I thought this book would be a good fit for me but it wasn't. I was expected something uplifting. Something hopeful about getting through the process. This book was merely the author bemoaning all that she lost and how grand it all had been.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Didion does a deep dive into the process of grief and mourning after the sudden death of her husband at home and near-loss of their only daughter in the same year. Powerful in the raw pain it conveys, but beautifully written.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      What a good book this is - Didion's writing is like music in the way that she plays on certain motifs. These motifs appear as phrases, some from her own thoughts, some from published work, some from memories. There's a lot to think about here, not least the way that we approach the death of someone close to us; also the way that people in a marriage interact. Her words just flow, almost more like one long (but so readable) essay.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I picked up this book on a friend's recommendation hoping to find some sort of inspirational story about how we can cope with sudden death and tragedy. As a person who suffers from considerable anxiety and a potent fear of my and my loved ones' deaths, I thought this book would be helpful, would give me strength and encouragement...
      Not so. It's not a bad book. It's very classic Joan Didion--serious, unflinching, dark. But it was too sad for me, too too sad. She presents her experience dealing with her husband' sudden death and her daughter's life threatening illness as horrible and lonely and frightening as you imagine it would be. When the story ends, she is continuing on, but she is still shattered, sad and irreversibly changed.
      I'm not saying I want her to lie...it's just I wish I hadn't read it. I made myself skim the whole book, even after I knew how depressing it was. But, I didn't need to go there.
      It was terribly, terribly sad. And I don't recommend it, unless you have gone through the same thing and you're looking to find a sort of recognition of your own misery.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Very moving

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Fascinating and deeply moving account of grieving process. It took me two days to finish it, really couldn't stop listening to the story. The lexical choices are absolutely stunning and the narrator is absolutely incredible, the combination moved me to tears several times

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      An odd choice of books perhaps, coming right after reading Billy Crystal's hilarious (and moving) memoir, STILL FOOLIN' 'EM, but Joan Didion's THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING is one of the most moving looks at bereavement and grief that you will ever encounter. The best book of its kind I have read since Anne Roiphe's EPILOGUE or Joyce Carol Oates' A WIDOW'S STORY. I much preferred Roiphe to Oates, but Didion's examination of the aftermath of a loved one's passing is maybe the best one of all. Not that there is any joy here, but there is certainly art. I had not read a Didion book since her early novels, PLAY IT AS IT LAYS and SALVADOR over forty years ago, but I'd read all the buzz about this one some years back. I'm glad I've finally read it. All the boxes are checked: NY Times bestseller, rave reviews from all of the press, hundreds and hundreds of favorable reader reviews, and the winner of the National Book Award. I'm late to the party - or wake - yet again (for this 2005 book), so what else could I possibly add. An ineffably sad, but beautifully written book. Thank you for giving it to us, Ms Didion. My highest recommendation.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The level of detail and the honesty in the writing. Didion does not back away from revealing her fears and her fragile feelings during this difficult time. Plus the delivery of the audio person is excellent.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      "Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.....Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing'. A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days....We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself."The Year of Magical Thinking was the book that Didion wrote to express her grief and her understanding of it when, in less than a two year period she lost both her husband and her daughter. This book deals with just the death of her husband of forty years John Gregory Dunne. Their daughter Quintana had fallen ill during the Christmas season, and was in a coma in the hospital. On December 30th, after coming home from visiting their daughter, Didion's husband had a massive heart attack and died. Didion would have to deal with this loss while continuing to visit her daughter, who will recover only to again be hospitalized after a fall where she hit her head and required brain surgery. Again the daughter will recover only to die a few months later. The death of her daughter is dealt with in her follow-up book Blue Nights.In writing about her own grief, Didion does the same thing that she has done so many times in her essays about the 60s and 70s - she places herself in the story. Firmly anchors herself there, and then steps back out so that she can report on the details as an almost objective observer. It works here so very perfectly - she reveals her vulnerability, her need to understand, her need to accept while acknowledging that she finds this an impossible task. There is no great wisdom to be grasped no matter how endlessly we seek to explain how we are supposed to go on after our world collapses, and life as we know it is forever altered. Grief is a surreal experience. It is not a linear progression - it takes each of us on our own journey, demanding an inventory of memory and of self."I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself."

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I found this book far less magical than the title suggested, and after now having processed three major personal losses in the past two years and having read at least three books centred on the subject of grief, I am pretty certain that no two griefs will ever be experienced in the same way, not even by the same person. The previous book I read about grief, Rachel Khong's "Goodbye, Vitamin," made me feel a bit callous that I did not care as much for the characters in the story because they did not see their experiences the way I saw mine. After reading Didion, I now just feel convinced that no one else's story can substitute for your own catharsis. That is not to say that there aren't moments of abject beauty in Didion's account of the year after she lost her husband, and I particularly appreciated her analysis of Emily Post's 1922 advice on mourning and on the culture shift around death that has followed in subsequent decades. However, multiple reviewers and book lists have suggested this book as a must-read for learning how to process grief. There is no such thing. This is a fine read for giving some intellectual thought to the subject if you are distant enough from experiencing it to do so. It is no guide to living your own process; you write that yourself with an invisible hand.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Very solipsistic. Didn't love it, but I didn't hate it, either, and it was a quick read.
    • 2/5
      Late one night in November 2005, as I flipped channels on the tv, I came across a woman being interviewed on Nightline by Meredith Viera, who was sitting in for Ted Koppel. The woman's name was Joan Didion and she had written a book. I don't know if I had even heard of her before, but it became obvious that she was an accomplished writer/journalist. As I listened to her talk about her book I was drawn to her story. The book is called THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING and it is a tragic, sad account of the sudden loss of her husband, novelist, journalist John Dunne (younger brother of Dominick Dunne) and soon after, her adult daughter, Quintana Roo and how she coped with the events and her loss. After watching her, I wanted to run right out and get her book. I was intrigued. The story itself is just awful. In New York on Christmas Day 2003, Quintana was admitted to the hospital with severe flu-like symptoms that soon escalated into pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was in a coma and on life support. Five days later after visiting their still comatose daughter in the hospital, John Dunne suffered a fatal heart attack. Four weeks later Quintana woke up and asked her mother, 'Where's Dad?'. It would be the first of many times she would have to explain to her daughter that her dad was gone. Two months later, she was released from the hospital and would begin to resume her life. But as it turned out Quintana collapsed at LAX airport returning home to California. She was rushed to the hospital where she underwent brain surgery to relieve a massive hematoma. She was in and out of hospitals and rehabs for months on end until she passed away in October 2005, the same time her mothers book was being released. Although my heart goes out to Joan Didion for the heartache she went through during that time, I have mixed feelings about the book. I really wanted to like this book and I wanted to come away with some knowledge of understanding grief that I hadn't had before. That is not at all what I got. Her grief is obvious, but she never really lets you in to the core of her human emotions. She gives great detail of the the movements she made going to and from hospitals and talking to this doctor and that specialist, but it all came across very cold and removed to me. One thing that bothered me about this book is that she makes it quite clear early on (if you are unaware of who they are) that she and John are literary people who take literature and their part in it very seriously. Everything has to be in connection with a passage they read or a book they wrote. But if you haven't spent 15 years in college and you don't have a Masters degree in literature, you have no knowledge of these references and they can't possibly have the same meaning as they do to the Dunne's, who live and breathe literature. The continuous references became tiresome to me. And these references would take her off onto stories of places she and John worked or lived, different countries they visited or lived for periods of time. Sometimes I forgot what she began talking about in the first place. There is an enormous amount of repetition as well. Maybe that was her frame of mind at the time of writing the book, but it became annoying. I felt she was rambling and her mind was wandering. Maybe it was. Another thing was the incessant name-dropping. It was as if every single famous person they knew was mentioned in this book. But there was never a meaningful story to go along with it. Just a mention of the name for whatever purpose. Its obvious Mrs. Dunne wanted to make sure the world knows that she and her husband moved in famous circles. THAT was the most annoying thing of all. When she mentioned that after John died and she couldn't eat, that "a friend" brought her Congee from a Chinatown restaurant everyday because that's all she could eat, she never once mentioned that persons name. Unless you were famous, you didn't get a mention. In all the months she was in the hospital with her daughter, there was never any mention of a conversation with Gerry, Quintana's husband. Only his name was brought up a handful of times. That seemed odd to me. I didn't expect this to be a self-help guide to grief counseling, but I did expect some insight into how she dealt with the pain and the loss. I was very disappointed. Once I finished the book, I felt no closer to understanding her experience than I did after watching her during her interview on Nightline. I started reading this book in mid 2006. It took me a year and a half to finish it. The review is a little long, and I hope I haven't spoiled it for anyone else, but I wanted to be honest about my opinion. If anyone else has read the book and feels differently (and I'm sure there are), feel free to leave a comment so we can discuss it if you'd like.
    • 5/5
      Astounding memoir about loss and grief. Any fan of Bret Easton Ellis will enjoy this.
    • 4/5
      A thoughtful and thought-provoking reflection on grief and mourning.
    • 5/5
      Didion is an excellent writer. This is the story of her reaction to her husband's death and their daughter's life-threatening illness. It's a hard book, and Didion is honest enough that I did not always like her. I really admire her writing, however, Recently I have read a couple of memoirs that failed, in my opinion, because the authors were too close to the subject to be objective. Here, Didion is very close to her subject, but she manages to also seem objective. I think what works here is spare writing, that doesn't include anything extraneous, and a great attention to details. Here is an example:"There came a time in the summer when I began feeling fragile, unstable. A sandal would catch on a sidewalk and I would need to run a few steps to avoid the fall. What if I didn't? What if I fell? What would break, who would see the blood streaming down my leg, who would get the taxi, who would be with me in the emergency room? Who would be with me once I came home?I stopped wearing sandals. I bout two pairs of Puma sneakers and wore them exclusively.