The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
| The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion | |
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| Category: Autobiography | |
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Reviewer: Heather Magee
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| Summary: A beautiful and heartbreaking chronicle of Didion's grieving process over the course of a year which becomes somewhat of an ode to change. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 227 | Date: September 2006 |
| Publisher: Harper Perennial | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-0007216857 | |
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This book is Joan Didion's heartbreaking autobiographical account of the grief she endured following her husband's sudden death. Books that shed light on taboo topics like death are such a beautiful and necessary resource to help people feel less alone. Didion unpicks unpleasant feelings surrounding death like self-pity, denial and delusion and makes them utterly normal, lends them a human face to wear.
Didion's writing merges academic, medical jargon with emotive language which is a powerful combination when discussing something as personal and simultaneously universal as grief. At times, I found the emphasis on diagnosis and specialist language slightly excessive, but I suppose it reflects Didion's complete obsession and absorption into this new terribly anxious mode of being that began to take over her life. Indeed, Didion recalls that even her childhood recourse for uncontrollable emotions was books and information: 'Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control,' she writes. And yet, like many good, honest books, she finally contradicts herself.
Nobody can ever truly be in control, no matter how much information one gleans throughout life, or no matter how many books one reads. The currents of time and the tectonic plates that lie semiconscious under our feet, Didion tells us, are the world's way of telling humans that we hold no control over change. Change will happen with or without us, and there is something so comforting about that message. Somehow, Didion manages to devastate her reader so deeply, meanwhile functioning as a kind of how-to for grieving, and offering a shoulder (or page) to cry on for those who need it most. Didion peppers snippets of psychological and medicinal information throughout her prose, but it is her acknowledgement that information cannot always give all the answers which makes this piece of non-fiction so poignant.
She also goes into detail on her daughter's critical health throughout the book which adds another layer to Didion's grief and invites readers to think about times when they have felt utterly helpless in the face of the medical complications and health struggles of their loved ones. It is an important and beautifully written book which can help people going through a similar thing.
This autobiographical account of a wife's experience with loss and grief is shared with The Iceberg: A Memoir by Marion Coutts and One Hundred Names For Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing by Diane Ackerman.
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at Amazon.com.
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