Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12542 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-04
• Released on: 2006-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 227 pages

Review
'It is the most awesome performance of both participating in, and watching, an event. Even though Didion does not allow herself to break down, only a terribly controlled reader will resist doing the same.' John Freeman, Independent 'Ultimately, and unexpectedly for a book about illness and death, this is a wonderfully life affirming book.' Lisa O'Kelly, Observer 'Searing, informative and affecting. Don't leave life without it.' Financial Times 'This is a beautiful and devastating book by one of the finest writers we have. Didion has always been a precise, humane and meticulously truthful writer, but on the subject of death she becomes essential.' Zadie Smith 'Taking the reader to places where they would not otherwise go is one of the things a really good book can do. "The Year of Magical Thinking" does just that, and brilliantly. Powerful, moving and true.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator 'A great book, a great work. Angular, exact, pressured and tough, precise as a diamond drill bit.' Nick Laird 'Didion's famously sparse, honed, almost brittle prose spells out an anguish which is universal. Her book, exploring an agonising universal experience, will speak to and maybe comfort anyone who has lost for ever the one they loved.' Val Hennesy, Critics Choice, Daily Mail 'Cool has been Didion's literary trademark, but this brave book maps a year in her life when the world flipped over to expose the underside of cool where things go bad.' The Times

Observer
'her poetic writing has a spell-like charm that is profoundly
affecting.'

Daily Express
'Didion's way of working through her grief is as remarkable as it
is moving.'

Customer Reviews

supporting loss
This is a book I would recommend to people who have suffered a loss and for those that have not yet as it is educational.A personal experience of the loss and grief of death, written with honesty, beautiful yet devastating, a passionate account that does not hold anything back. A must read for anyone who is suffering with the loss of a loved one.

Raw, Painful and Not to be Missed
Joan Didion lost her husband, John Gregory Dunne, as they were sitting down to dinner on December 30, 2003. What follows is an amazing journey (one that hadn't been completed by the end of the book) through the deals we make with ourselves and with the World in order to avoid the unavoidable. This is NOT an inspirational story. It is raw, difficult to read, heartbreaking.

What is present in the telling is what the reader brings to it. Speaking for myself, I could thoroughly understand Didion's decision not to part with John's shoes, because he would need them "when he came back." Her coming back from a walk with news for him only to get all the way to the apartment before remembering. These are things that I have done, and until I sat down to read The Year of Magical Thinking, I thought I was the only one who grieved this way.

Didion spends a good deal of time on society's insistence that we not "dwell on" our grief or indulge in "self pity." The truth is that it is healthy to grieve, and that it has its own timetable for every single person who goes through it. This is one person's experience; it may not be yours, but it is educational in many ways. I find it amazing that the most accurate depiction of how to take care of a griefstricken person comes from a 1922 Emily Post book on etiquette. All these years later, and we have gotten farther from what is needed, not closer. This, for obvious reasons, saddened me more than anything I read in Year of Magical Thinking.

Knowing that shortly after Year was released, Joan Didion also lost her beautiful daughter, Quintana, only makes the experience more bitter. I am so grateful to Joan Didion for sharing her experience. I usually trade books after I've finished reading them - this one, I placed back on the shelf so that I can re-read, study and learn in future years.

don't waste your time
This book was way too long.... about 250 pages way too long in fact. I don't quite know what a reader is supposed to surmise from it. For a seemingly intelligent woman the author showed a remarkable lack of insight into the nature and existence of life and its end result. So caught up in the smallest detail (to a boringly obsessive degree in fact) the bigger picture was totally lost on her. I found it totally unmoving.