Reader, be warned, as this is not going to be an impartial and fair review, as due to my partiality, I did love this book.

As an aside, I’ll point out that a good portion of my reading, in general, bears no resemblance to my life. Not this book, though. I chose this one on purpose, and at the end of reading it, I checked five stars automatically, all because this book was a comfort to me. Maybe because misery does love company.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a personal account, a chronicle of the author’s grief after the sudden death of her husband. It won the National Book Award in 2005 and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. On top of being almost poetic, I found it to be sincere, real, and touching in a profound way.

The book begins with the couple, the author and her husband at the dinner table, having returned home from visiting their daughter in the hospital. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, stops at midsentence, suffering a cardiac arrest, and falls. He dies probably right away or later, despite all the efforts of the EMTs.

This very moment, the author keeps returning to throughout the book with lines sounding like refrains in a poem. “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

This is the terrible moment at the end of the year 2003, which has the author recording her own mental states and the goings on around her. The act of mourning, the wish for the deceased husband to return, that obsessive wishful thinking the author calls magical, the inability to part with some objects and things belonging to him, and places that are reminders of him that come up throughout the following year are the meat and flesh of the book.

Meanwhile, she copes well outwardly and deals with her daughter’s illness and by July of 2004, she even attempts to report the Democratic and Republican conventions. The book ends at the Thirty-First of December, in exactly a year since her husband’s death.

The nature and the effects of grief lie at the center of this book, together with a personal perspective, introspection, and exploration of emotions. I felt the writing was much more than dumping feelings. It was a search for the insight into grief.

What touched me the most were the parallels between me and the author in feeling and reactions to the death of a spouse. While some things were exactly the same, like the vortex and grief coming in waves, other more tangible facts were similar. The author was married in 1964; I was married in 1966. Her husband died in 2003, mine died in March, 2020. Like her I keep stuff due to illogical wishful feeling, and I keep talking to him, although I go about stoically doing the logical things and performing the needed acts.

Here are some of the lines I highlighted:
“Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.”

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”

“divorces happen, but these husbands and wives leave behind them webs of intact associations, however acrimonious. Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.”

“The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. I look for resolution and find none.”

Thank you, Joan Didion, for holding my hand without even knowing it.

finding about what grief feels like.

is Joan Didion, the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction. Her books are: Where I Was From, Political Fictions, The Last Thing He Wanted, After Henry, Miami, Democracy, Salvador, A Book of Common Prayer, and Run River

it is authentic and so well-written.

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Created Aug 15, 2020 at 4:54pm • Submit your own review...