The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion’s book is heralded for its bravery, clarity, and confessional witness about grief and loss. Indeed, it’s all these things, but for me, more importantly, this book paints a masterful depiction of the loss of innocence that comes when you lose something meaningful—like a loved one.

Particularly, it shows, with exhilarating force, the fragmented sense of time of such an experience, moving from Didion’s darkest moments of despair at the loss of her husband in the present to treasured memories of her life before his passing and musings about what comes now—in the future.

This book is not… show more.

I read Didion’s book a few months after my dad died. People told me it was “hard” and “intense,” but the book only made me feel held.

With its repetitions and circling, it emulates the grief mind, the way we are always returning to what happened in an effort to comprehend the incomprehensible. Didion looks straight at the absence that she must live with for the rest of her life, the death of her husband. Through its looping prose, her searching memoir exposes the way grief rewires us.

In a time when I felt disconnected from the world, reading this… show more.

This book, by the late American essayist, Joan Didion, will not be a surprise choice for many people who are looking for a companion to not just guide them through the grieving process but also to reassure them that they are not going crazy.

I was disheartened in March 2022 when I learned that prolonged grief had been added to the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health) and classified as a mental disorder. There is no uniform end date on normal grief and The Year of Magical Thinking exquisitely underscores this idea.

Charting her own journey after her… show more.

We all know Joan Didion. If you don’t, you’re about to.

Throughout this book, Didion unpacks how traumatizing and life-altering grief of a close loved one can be. Her words are like a warm hug through the pages, for those of us going through the same or similar things.

She explains how grief can suck the joy from a once healthy mind, explaining how to come to terms with what once was and what must be.

While your daughter is hospitalized, on the brink of death, your husband dies suddenly. How do you make sense of it all?

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion iteratively revisits the events that occurred over the few days before and after her husband (the writer John Dunne) suffers a cardiac arrest as she explores the notion of illness, grief, and our medical system.

This book taught me about how my own patients and their families navigate death, and prepared me for when my own father died.

I grew up hearing Joan Didion’s name but didn’t start reading her until I was an empty nester, and felt so late to the party. When she died in late 2021, the world lost a great American writer. This book has been described as “achingly beautiful” and I can’t improve on that.

Joan takes us on a candid and unforgettable healing journey. She shares with heartbreaking honesty about her beautiful marriage, the death of her husband, and the life they had together, then shows us ways to stay human, to look for beauty in every moment, and find our way… show more.

Joan Didion was a master of nonfiction. In this book, she talks about the death of her husband and the illness of her daughter who predeceased her too. It's about loss but also about the fragility of life, how precarious and precious it is. There is a slight detachment in her writing but there is a huge amount to learn here. 

So raw. Joan Didion’s memoir about the sudden loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, while also dealing with her daughter’s illness is powerful in its simplicity. A woman’s two most important relationships being pulled out from her touched me deeply. How she explores her long marriage while grieving hit me hard. Although we all deal with grief in different ways, I think there are universal aspects that many will respond to in this lovely, haunting book.

I am amazed by the way Joan Didion probes her own sense of sanity following the sudden death of her beloved husband, the way she questions everything she thought she knew as she examines her marriage and the workings of her grief and loss. Her candor is brave, memorable, and inspiring, and helped me get through my own grief when my mother died.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is Didion’s most personal and most heartbreaking work. This was her personal account of loss after the death of her husband, while her daughter was in a hospital.

I read this when I was trying to make sense of my own personal loss. This has helped me greatly in trying to wrap my head around the unthinkable. With her clear and concise writing, her words spoke to me on a personal level about how to soldier when an unexpected tragedy happens. It made me go on and live even for just another… show more.