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PRODUCT
The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner (Vintage International)
Product Description:
Price:
$13.99
Detailed description:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness … about marriage and children and memory … about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
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Product group:
Categories: Women Writers
Product name:
The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner (Vintage International)
Price:
$13.99
Gabrield –
Didion is a brillant observer. Her almost detached, analytical way of documenting her process of grief and mourning is likely to resonate with readers whose experience, fears and anxieties have proven, wholly or in part, immune to denial.
Ria Singh –
I once read a review that said Joan Didion was a narc just talking about herself, nothing could be further away from the truth, this is an amazing book of grief and so simply written, if you have experienced grief aka loos of someone, all these thoughts and more have already raced through your mind but reading this feels like comfort, to know you are not alone .
Kcorn –
I stayed up almost all might just to finish reading it, unable to put this down, although I confess I had to keep a box of tissues nearby. I’ve lost 5 people in the last few years and, just recently, another friend and so I related very strongly to this book.
Didion’s unflinching account of the sudden loss of her husband (which occurred while their only child was in a coma in a hospital (!)) deserves to be a classic in the genre of books written by and for those who are grieving. It is hard to find books like this, which are both honest but not overly sentimental, not resorting to the tropes which seem to surround death. She doesn’t offer vague platitudes or advice. She simply relates her very personal experience, including the inevitable vulnerability, unexpected moments of being blindsided by memories and sudden tears, etc.
She covers all the bases, including the kind of insanity that can seize one in the throes of grief, those moments when you forget the person is actually dead, when you turn to speak to him or her as you normally would at a certain part of the day or reach for the phone to share the latest news.
The book is raw. If you’re looking for religous or spiritual guidance and inspiration, this is not the book for you. As Didion herself noted, writing about the book recently, it was intentionally written “raw”. I assume she didn’t want to wait, to distance herself from the intensity of the experience as she wrote it down, quite unlike many other books she has written. Raw or not, it wasn’t sloppy, overly sentimental or complete despairing.
It was simply honest, heartwrenchingly so, and Didion doesn’t deviate from communicating, in absolute striking detail, the sense of alienation and disorientation that separates mourners from those who seem to be living “normal” lives. Grief is its own territory, separate from so-called normalcy. In so many ways, it is an illness, an affliction of the spirit and not one that can be cured in any one way.
An aside- the photo of Didion inside the dustjacket is haunting. No question that those are the eyes of someone who has been scraped to the core, wounded and, presumably, still recovering. There is something beautiful in that portrait and, oddly, comforting. It is the face of a survivor, however hard it might be to live as one.
This book will remain on my bookshelf and I expect I’ll be thumbing through it for solace time and again. Reading it was both painful and cathartic and strangely comforting, with an intensity that left me awestruck. I am still amazed that she was able to produce such a beautifully written book in the throes of so much pain.
Adriana Cortes –
La narrativa enigmatica de Didion nos invita a lo más íntimo de su relación y de su duelo.
Llegó un poco maltratado.
Happy Client –
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”
This book is not a primer on how to deal with grief. You won’t find advice here.
Instead, Didion holds up a mirror and shows us the familiar. All the feelings, the regrets, the wishes, the bargains, the rollercoaster, the isolation, the wanting to disappear and the surprise at being invisible, the little innocuous events that trigger the feeling of emptiness in the memories, and even the awkwardness in our encounters with others’ well-meaning but otherwise useless “advice,” is all here. Raw. Relatable. Normal.
We see our grief from a different perspective, a window into why our society shuns mourning, leaving the bereaved swinging in the wind, alone, embarrassed by our inability to “just let out go, ” to “move on,” because our loved ones would want us to get on with living.
Grief makes us feel crazy or deranged. We never know when it’s going to show up, when it will gut punch us at the worst possible time.
Grief isn’t about self-pity. It’s the place we go to in order to make sense of the ending we never wanted to experience. It’s the first stage of living the new life death gifts to us. When nothing at all makes sense, Didion manages to help us see that it all makes sense if we just accept that we’re grieving and move along with it, let it play out, until we’re not anymore.
Life changes in an instant.
That’s just how it works.
C. Schafer Vazquez –
Perfect
Jon Linden –
In an extraordinary exposition, Ms. Didion describes her experiences during the year after her husband’s untimely demise. The book is a wonderfully clear and adept elucidation of her feelings and thoughts during this period. The wonder of her ability to clarify this period in her mind enough to write about it is the mark of an extraordinary author.
Her story starts just before the death of her husband and his death from a myocardial infarction is described in detail. In addition, at the same time that her husband is dying/died, her daughter is in the hospital with an incredibly life threatening illness. The juxtaposition of the tale of her daughter’s medical travails and her thoughts on her husband’s death make the tale ever so much more poignant.
She covers a very large amount of ground in the grief and bereavement period. Her thoughts about what her husband last said, and of what she thought about in her past life with a man she was married to for 40 years; and her thoughts as she tries to recover from the lose of a life long partner are described with tenderness and beauty.
Most interesting are the comments on “self-pity” that she makes. She quotes D.H. Lawrence’s famous 4 line poem:
“I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself,
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
In this description of self-pity, she belies Lawrence’s contention. But not completely, as she comments on self-pity as a state one wants to hang onto, while at the same time realizing how pathetic the state. But she resolves to bring herself back to the point of normalcy; of being a regular person to the extent at least that she can interact normally with others.
While her thinking does not in any way really seem “Magical” it does seem revealing. While her particular story of grief and recovery is very personal, it is also very indicative of what people feel in her situation. It is said that nothing is more severe than losing a spouse. Ms. Didion buttresses this contention with her book. Nothing quite disorients a person as much as the death of the one whom one has shared their life with, the most intimate moments of that life. The book is highly recommended to all people. It is a learning experience for those who have not experienced it, and it is a reiteration for those who have, but with a certain clarity that is not usual for people to develop.
Tita –
It’s raw, poetic and chaotic. Didion bares her soul candidly about such a harrowing moment in her life, that we can’t help but join her in this experience. It’s spellbinding. I just couldn’t put it down. Highly recommended for all those who have gone through or wish to further understand the grieving process.