The Year of Magical Thinking Audiobook By Joan Didion cover art

The Year of Magical Thinking

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The Year of Magical Thinking

By: Joan Didion
Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
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National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2005

"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.

The weeks and months that followed "cut loose any fixed idea I had about death, about illness, about probability and luck...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience. Her portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad, will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, a wife, or a child.

Listen to Joan Didion's full-hour interview with Charlie Rose.©2005 Joan Didion (P)2005 HighBridge Company Biographies & Memoirs Memoir Essentials Mental Health Awareness National Book Award Grief & Loss Women Thought-Provoking Heartfelt Marriage Art & Literature Authors Personal Development Inspiring Grief Motherhood

Critic reviews

  • 2005 Audie Award Nominee, Biography/Memoir
  • National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee, Autobiography, 2005

"Many will greet this taut, clear-eyed memoir of grief as a long-awaited return to the terrain of Didion's venerated, increasingly rare personal essays....This is an indispensable addition to Didion's body of work and a lyrical, disciplined entry in the annals of mourning literature." (Publishers Weekly)
"The Year of Magical Thinking is not a downer. On the contrary. Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative." (The New York Times)

Featured Article: The top 100 memoirs of all time


All genres considered, the memoir is among the most difficult and complex for a writer to pull off. After all, giving voice to your own lived experience and recounting deeply painful or uncomfortable memories in a way that still engages and entertains is a remarkable feat. These autobiographies, often narrated by the authors themselves, shine with raw, unfiltered emotion sure to resonate with any listener. But don't just take our word for it—queue up any one of these listens, and you'll hear exactly what we mean.

Featured Article The top 100 memoirs of all time
Raw Emotional Honesty • Lyrical Prose • Perfect Narration • Insightful Grief Exploration • Thoughtful Reflection

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This book can be extremely comforting to anyone who lives through the death of a loved one. I can see from reading other reviews that some people don't get it; 3 years ago I wouldn't have either. When you're in "the twilight zone" of grief, you appear to be recovering from loss in a straight-forward, linear fashion--from the outside. Didion captures the jumbled emotions, guilt, irrational thought patterns, dreams, paralysis and flashbacks that she and others have lived through with the presence of mind of a gutsy, professional writer. Thanks, Joan, I'm not crazy after all.

once you've been there, you know

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THis was the first audiobook I've ever listened to and it was an excellent introduction to the genre. The reader, Barbara Caruso, was wonderful. I listened while on jury duty and I'm sure the other members of the jury pool must have wondered why that woman sitting in the corner of the room was listening to her ipod and weeping.

Magical Thinking

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I was informed this was the ultimate work on grief. The only thing it taught me was how different grief could be for individuals. Disappointing and unhelpful. If you are looking for a way to work through your grief, this is not the book you.

Disappointing

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Grief has never been so cutting, truthful and eloquent as this book shows. Ms. Didion's account of the year after her husband's sudden death is an elegant, sentimental journey that those shed to light all those feelings of despair, loneliness and emptiness that a death of a dear one cause on the living.

Excellent

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I've seen the author interviewed a few times and I didn't feel like this was her voice, her presentation of her own work. I also didn't feel like spirit of a number of passages was captured. Finally, there is music fading in & out at chapter breaks. this was terribly distracting and the sound mix was bad so narrator was competing with music.

Overproduced: why the music?

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