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Title: The Year of Magical Thinking
Author: Joan Didion
First published: 2005
Dates read: 03.05. – 11.05.2023
Category: first-time read, own book, memoir, non-fiction
Rating: 4/5
The book in five words or less: eloquent meditation on grief

My thoughts:

A couple of years ago, I read Didion’s Blue Nights and liked it, but felt like I was missing a bit of context. Impulse-buying this title early in 2023 filled some of those gaps, although it was reading more of her essay collections and watching The Center Will Not Hold (2017), the documentary about her life and work her nephew Griffin Dunne made, that helped me fully grasp the background that informed Didion’s relationships with her husband and daughter, and thus both Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking. In fact, I think the two books are best read in tandem as they are, in essence, both meditations on grief and, by extension, life.

Starting from the precise moment her husband suffered the cardiac event that would prove fatal to him, Didion chronicles her experience of the different stages and shades of grief. In order to understand her own grief, she turns to literature, science and faith, and also walks the reader through her thought processes as best as she can reconstruct them. However, and this is one of Didion’s central points, writing about memory is always tricky because the linear sequence and rhythm of words is incapable of catching the multiple emotions, thoughts and events happening simultaneously in moments of shock and grief. Instead, Didion wishes she could cut her memories like a film to rearrange and speed up and collapse the time frame – and then she proceeds to do just that by repeating the same scenes and phrases over the course of the book and delving into a different aspect of the grieving process each time.

I found this stylistic approach just as fascinating as the subject matter of the book, and I will say that Didion’s way of describing and reckoning with the huge loss that was her husband’s death made immediate sense to me. I don’t think ‘enjoy’ is the right verb when speaking about a book on grief, but I really liked Didion allowing me to live in her head for a while.

Read if you like: Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, Didion’s follow-up Blue Nights, meditations on grief, Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, Gabriele von Arnim’s Das Leben ist ein vorübergehender Zustand and Daniel Schreiber’s Zeit der Verluste