I didn’t dislike this book, but I didn’t really get anything out of it either. It is a difficult subject matter – no one wants to think about their closest loved ones dying – but what makes Didion’s grief any different than anyone else’s? There isn’t even any sort of insight into how one should deal with their grief and move on (or at least forward), because Didion didn’t deal with it, she wallowed in it, using it as an excuse to essentially check out of life. The only thing I found even a little insightful was at the beginning, when she talks about grief being a mental illness rather than some temporary condition. I think the book might have been more interesting if it had been written later and was about both the death of her husband and her daughter (who did eventually pass away in 2005).

As a side note, this was the selection for my book club this month, and it was universally disliked. Most of the women in the group are over 50, and I think their general thought was 'Oh, just get over it already!' ( )

I don't know that I have anything intelligent, witty, or critical to say about this. The palpable grief revealed in these pages left me thinking too long and too hard about how I would deal with my own husband's death. The deep-sinking-sickness in my torso is a small scratch to the horror of the real experience, but it was enough to make reading this book uncomfortable.

I will say, however, that I was impressed by Didion's honesty and her consistency. This is not a self-help book or a "one woman's journey of personal discovery" book; for me at least, this was an honest and heart-wrenching look, not at how one recovers from the death of a spouse, but at how one does not recover. And that feels so much more real to me than the myriad other books out there on the subject that hold on to hope as the central message.

Memorable Scene: When Joan's daughter, Quintana, needs a tracheostomy, Joan refuses. Her mind is convinced that if the operation isn't performed, Quintana will be fine. She can see the illogic but can't feel it: "This was demented, but so was I."

Memorable Quote: Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself. ( )

Bought this after reading the excerpt in the NY Times Magazine. It's good, but you could probably stick with the excerpt. ( )

Didion writes about the year of her husband’s death and the onset of her daughter’s health problems. Didion’s daughter Quintana went into the hospital on Christmas morning with what looked like a bad case of flu. Pneumonia followed, and then septic shock. Five nights after her admission, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack. Some weeks later Quintana, after being released from one hospital, was readmitted to another for an arterial bleed (she had been given anticoagulants for clots that formed during her long inactivity during the first hospitalization).
Didion writes about the unwillingness to let in the officers who knock on the door (she is remembering an Iraq widow’s account) and says this is why she wanted to be alone on the first night after Dunne’s death: “so he could come back.” “This,” she writes, “was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.” She won’t give away his clothes because he’ll need them “when he comes back,” and she makes other irrational moves with this unconscious motive—the magical thinking is the unconscious conviction that he might come back.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, a journal he kept after his wife’s death. Didion studies the literature: Lewis, Philippe Ariès’ Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (1973), Geoffrey Gorer, Death, Grief, and Mourning (1965), Emily Post on the etiquette of funerals (1922), articles on grief in The Journal of the American Psychiatric Association and The Lancet, a National Academy of Science Institutes of Medicine compilation on bereavement (1984). She compares her reactions to those observed by the professionals. She works up the topic.
. If you look at the blurbs on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, you will find that the reviewers insist on the book’s honesty, candor, and exactness. Looking at these blurbs, I found myself wondering how they can know the book has any of these qualities. Is it because Didion paints an unflattering picture of herself? Or is our reaction that no one would make up these things, no one would write down such a combination of the horrible and the ordinary? Of course the horrible things are a matter of public record: the death of Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, while their daughter was in intensive care, and the daughter’s subsequent partial recovery and brain hemorrhage.
In Los Angeles, where Quintana is in a UCLA intensive care unit, Didion moves back and forth from her hotel to the hospital, trying to avoid the memory “vortex”—since they lived in the area for many years, in Malibu and in Brentwood. And there is what she calls the “Appointment in Samarra” aspect of grief and memory: if I had been here or done that, could the disaster have been avoided?
She flies back to New York with Quintana on an ambulance plane. In New York, as her daughter starts to recover, Didion resolves to do the same. She stops trying “to substitute an alternate reel” in the summer of 2004 and begins trying to reconstruct eveything leading up to Dunne’s death. She talks about encountering meaninglessness and about slef-pity that seems unavoidable (when younger, she dismissed the “whining” she found in Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin’s Leftover Life to Kill). When she gets the autopsy report she realizes Dunne was dead instantly and no intervention or preventive measure (he’d had angioplasty in that artery twenty years before) could have changed that outcome.
She begins to write again in August and September; she has friends for dinner on Christmas Eve as they’d done the year before. “The craziness is receding,” she writes, “but no clarity is taking its place.” ( )

I read an excerpt of this book some time ago in a magazine but can't remember which magazine. The excerpt was compelling and heart wrenching. I just finished the book and without giving everything away Joan Didion has chronicled the months following the death of her husband. She opens herself so fully and relates this tragic event so honestly that it tears at your heart. Don't let this scare you away from this extraordinary memoir...death is inevitable and we will all have to come to terms with, or may have already. I absolutely couldn't put this book down. I just can't fathom that she lost her daughter in the time between finishing the book and it's publishing. It's so true what she writes about our sanity...that it is so fleeting.

This book is a keeper, so I'd encourage you to grab a copy from your local independent bookstore. ( )