The Year of Magical Thinking
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The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Biography & Memoir
Aug 1, 2018
On December 30, 2003, Didion and her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, went to a hospital to visit their daughter, Quintana, who was in an induced coma as part of a severe course of treatment for a mysterious illness and septic shock. Later that evening, they returned to their Manhattan apartment and sat down to dinner. They talked about their day. In the middle of their conversation, John slumped in his chair, raised his hand, and died. “John was talking, then he wasn’t,” Didion writes in this spare and deeply affecting mourning diary, one of the most significant books of recent times to reckon with the weight and obligations imposed by death, and by the untethering from normalcy grief brings. What is most moving in Didion’s anatomy of grief is that it offers no false comfort. In the wake of tragedy, we may hope to find in books some testament that the worst will pass if only we “work through” our pain. Nothing doing. Coming to terms with death, Didion shows us, means coming to the only terms it allows, which are the same as life’s, but lonelier: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And there’s something so true and nourishing in the telling here that The Year of Magical Thinking seems—paradoxically—a necessary, life-enhancing miracle, and a boon to those whose grief is boundless.
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Nov 28, 2018
this touched my heart.
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May 12, 2019
Just read it. This book will change your life, and maybe your death... a beautiful, funny, heartbreaking and uplifting piece of art. I don’t know how she can state something so simply which also conveys the deepest human feelings. Brilliant.
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Oct 29, 2021
Very inspiring
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Oct 29, 2021
Very inspiring and well-written.
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Dec 12, 2021
Beautiful and vulnerable account of a head on collision with mortality.
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Jul 28, 2023
The fog of loss.
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