The Year of Magical Thinking

By: Joan Didion

Narrated by: Barbara Caruso

Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

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

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)

Haunting

I listened to this over two days. Having experienced grief several times I found the memoir comforting and relatable. We may all grieve in our own ways but we are not alone. It reminded me once more to live and love fully each day as it could be last for myself or the ones around me.

grief & its companion elements

I read, then listened to, this book with thoughts of myself. Our grief over a loss in our lives is personal to us, yet it touches everyone in their own personal way. The faith involved is personal as well. Faith in God, faith in self, in someone or something else, gives us a place to start when grief begins. Personally, I don't believe grief ends, it just gets easier to deal with.

The author guides us through part of her grief while telling us what happened. Sometimes in a technical way, sometimes in a more personal way. How it happened isn't the most important part, but how it mattered to her is.

I enjoyed this book. The performance shows a range of emotion that makes you feel the story just as much as the words tell it.

Intimate look at Didion's life

Sometimes found the narrator's laughs or the overdramatic background music a bit out of touch with Didion's typically sober style. But in some points, the intensity of delivery from the narrator seemed just right.
As for the book itself, it was fascinating to be made a part of something so intimate about Didion's life as marriage, family, and grief - all of them explored with an admirable emotional intelligence.

Such an endearing portrait

I'm glad I listened to this book rather than reading it. I plan to re-listen more than once - so sensitively written.

Background music

Amazing book, solid performance. But there is background music during the end and beginning of chapters and randomly throughout. It was so distracting that i found myself rewinding multiple times to catch the actual writing. Such a beautiful, easy book was broken up by church sounding musak. Reminded me of something you would hear at a tacky funeral home.

Meditations on grief

Meditative musings of a thoughtful person steeped in grief from the sudden loss of a life-partner. Almost poetic in its repetitions of certain key phrases that really tug at the emotions as a reader. It’s hard to convey such emotions and mental states in words but Didion is masterful. The narrator had a clear concise and easy to understand voice. My only complaint is the mood-incongruent and distracting piano music at the change of chapters.

unendingly interesting

This was my first time reading a Didion book. I was thrilled with the pace, the parade of thoughts she had- the duality of a heart shattered by loss but the courage to carry on...even if it is one step at a time. Her ability to focus on her daughter's health, while leaving grieving for her husband for another day. Fascinating. The pace & being inside the thoughts of this woman was so familiar...flooding memories & feelings & thoughts came so intuitively it was easy to follow along yet be amazed at her ability to keep it together. Fabulous book.

From Grief to Mourning

I didn't know I needed this book. I lost a daughter-in-law and my mother within 2 months of each other. It has been 18 months, but it feels like I'm just now living the first year "without". Two pivotal paragraphs for me were these:

Chapter 12:
"That I was only now beginning the process of mourning did not occur to me. Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day. I had passed an entire season during which the only words I allowed myself to truly hear were recorded: Wel-come to U-C-L-A. I began."

Chapter 22
" All year I have been keeping time by last year’s calendar: what were we doing on this day last year, where did we have dinner, is it the day a year ago we flew to Honolulu after Quintana’s wedding, is it the day a year ago we flew back from Paris, is it the day. I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. This day a year ago was December 31, 2003. John did not see this day a year ago. John was dead."

Highly Recommend to ANYONE in the Tornado of Grief

That’s it. That’s my review. It changed my life and made me feel deeply seen. It helped me deal with the grief illiteracy I was drowning in.

Loved

I love the way she writes: her metaphors and her voice. I recommend this for anyone experiencing loss- the ending is magical.