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)

A Jazz-like Reverie of Grief

I’ve been ambivalent about W.B. Yeats’s poem, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” for many years. In it, Yeats grapples with the death of the son of his long-time friend Lady Gregory by reviewing the many deaths that have shaken him over the years. He thinks of his grandfather, an uncle, and a mentor figure, and only after that, he turns to think of Robert Gregory, shot down as an aviator during World War I. As he concludes, “a thought of that late death took all my heart for speech.”

On the one hand, I’ve admired that line for its implicit power. Here is arguably the greatest poet of the century claiming that words fail him. In so quiet a way, he pays the deepest respect he can to the friend and son-like figure he’s lost: he’s said that even he cannot find language for the deep grief. On the other hand, it looks like an instance of Yeats blinking in the face of his own great pain. It is, in that view, a kind of cowardice. Owning up to it would mean wrestling with a pain that might make him question all he knows of his life; it might mean a naked self-examination he chose not to undertake. (There’s a lot to be said about Yeats’s fundamental cowardice, the sense of his living his life and career in a self-scripted fashion that ultimately underwrote his fascism, but that’s a story for another time.)

I think of Yeats as I think about this powerful memoir of Joan Didion because, in contrast, Didion is fearless as she contemplates the loss of her husband and the imminent loss of her only child. From its opening line, “Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant,” we see Didion acknowledging the most difficult truth possible: that she may not know enough even to be writing the words that she is. In fact, she acknowledges that she wrote those words and then had to come back to them later to realize the vulnerable place she’d set upon to begin with.

Overall, yes, this is a book about mourning, and it’s been good for me to read it in the lightening shadow of my own mother’s death this summer. But what I take away most from it is Didion’s absolute insistence on looking the unknown in the face and not blinking. She cries a lot. She allows herself to be distracted by quotidian memories of a life that, charming as it is, isn’t all that interesting for those of us who didn’t lead it. And she finds solace in quick references to classic and contemporary books that she sees as providing glimpses of the same grief she’s experiencing. But, throughout, she is grappling with the kind of deeply honest question that Yeats so articulately side-stepped: an idea I’d paraphrase as “What’s left of me when so much of my world is gone?”

If that weren’t enough, the first 30-40 pages of this are absolutely stunning. It’s hardly news that Didion is one of our best living essayists (although it may be worth noting, as I read this book almost 13 years after it came out, that she hasn’t written a great deal since this great public disrobing) but the quality of her prose is flat-out lyrical in that opening sweep. I must have read parts of this when it came out because much of it was very familiar. I hadn’t read it all, though, yet it remained familiar even as I kept going to passages that must have been new to me.

The metaphor that kept coming to me was jazz. It felt like I was reading a solo by someone like Dexter Gordon or John Coltrane, like I was hearing something the musician/author was creating in the instant. In the best jazz, you get the sense that the next note is arbitrary, as if it could be any number of possibilities, but that, once played, it could only have been that note. It’s as if the musician/author is unearthing something that hadn’t existed until it did, and that then had to be the way it was.

I’m not sure quite how long that lyrical section runs on, but that’s part of its power. It catches you up and wraps you in its language. It may as well be a poem, and I suspect even Yeats might have admired its technical power.

Then, not abruptly, we get interrupted by Didion’s reconsideration of the life she’s choppily trying to resume as well as by memories of the everyday life she and her husband lived. I’ll own up, as many other reviewers have acknowledged, that it gets a little slow in those parts. I’m sympathetic when she describes the child-made bookmark she finds in the last book her husband was reading or when she listens to his voice on the answering machine message, but I’m not particularly moved. There’s a quotidian quality to it, an almost boring sense that she’s making a public record that would ordinarily belong to her private self.

As I kept going, though, I began to sense that even such slowness was part of the jazz composition effect. The quotidian is counter-point to the lyrical. Didion knows she’s good in those early pages. She knows she’s found the voice that made her famous and that she’s using it to grapple with her new crisis. And yet, in a way I find beautiful beneath the ordinariness, she doubts that. Unlike Yeats, she lets herself ponder herself without “the coat” (as Yeats puts it in one early poem) of her great language. He boasts “there’s more enterprise in going naked,” but she’s the one who goes to that place of vulnerability that he can never let himself reach. She is, in other words, unafraid to step outside her Coltrane-like technique and confront her loss in language ordinary enough for most of the rest of us to have used.

Could not put it down

Fascinating book. Joan is so honest about her experiences after John’s death, which I greatly appreciate. Her attention to detail is remarkable. The reciter was a bit too formal for me, but clear. It is a book I will probably live and certainly not forget.

Beautiful Memoir About Love and Loss

I started listening to this shortly after my relationship came to an abrupt and unexpected end. This book struck me as being incredibly raw and honest, and of course, it is beautifully written. It was like a prose poem contemplating existence, love, existence without love, and death, the final and inevitable end of all things.

Dealing With Grief

It was very interesting and thought provoking Everyone struggles with Grieving.When she came to grips with the fact that her husband wasn't coming back,she realized she had to move on to the future.The narrator was very good.

Great voice and writing

I have known about Joan Didion for a long time, but never read her. After this book I will checkout other books by her. But this narrator is gold! I could listen to her all day.

Heartbreakingly Honest

Written with all the emotions involved in trying to live with the death of a spouse. And on top of that, dealing with a critically ill daughter. Amazing that the author could write about such traumatic events in her life.

Just okay

I had high hopes for this book due to the high praise I’ve seen for it but it wasn’t for me. It felt like a rambling sterile journal entry of the year after her husbands death, with too many medical details about her daughters condition and treatment. The chronology of dates and events was boring and tedious, I listened on double speed which I rarely do. The last chapter was the best part and it was brief.

So touching

The narration and story were gorgeous and raw, sternly journalistic and real at the same time.

One of the best books I’ve ever read

I’m sorry if you need this, but you need this.

It wants me to say more, there’s no more to be said. Right where you are, there you are.

This book took my breath away

A true study of love and grief - I discovered this book after my brother took his life, it helped me more than any other book.

I’m now reading everything she’s ever written. I love her words.