This is one of the best book I've read so far.

Joan Didion wrote an amazing and unforgettable account on the death of her husband and illness of her daughter which happened within the same year. Of all the books on death--those self-help ones or religious ones--this is the book which truly helped me to understand more about grief and find comfort in that other people go through the same thing too. It wasn't about understanding death (who knows about death, really?), it was embracing the grief, realizing that all the thoughts I had and feelings I went through wasn't craziness, that trying to hold on is normal. She described perfectly all the emotions I couldn't put into words. I was reading the book and in my head I kept saying, Yes, yes! That's exactly how I felt, that's exactly what I was thinking. Grief is not something to just "get over", as Didion wrote.

Losing my mother was hard enough, I can't imagine losing my husband. It was amazing how she coped with both events--devastating events. I would've broken down and not be able to stand up unless God wills it. And for her to be able to write this book is miraculous.

Truly magical thinking.

Worth reading, if only for the insight into the inner workings of the mind of the recently bereaved. ( )

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. ( )

I've had this one kicking around for a while. And it's also the second copy to have passed through my hands, the first one unread. I was obviously reluctant to read it, given its subject matter. Joan Didion, an American journalist and writer, describing her year of grief - and inability to think, behave, or act one hundred percent rationally - following the sudden death of her much loved husband. Whoa, barrel of laughs there.

Of course, it wasn't a barrel of laughs at all (spot on the money there), and I was reduced to tears on a number of occasions (picture if you will, me sitting on the sofa, saying "and... and... and... *sob* she kept his shoes because he might... might... might... *hiccup* need them when he came back, and he's never coming back... *wail*" etc).

But, while it was obviously an exercise in coming to terms with her deep grief at such a loss (and at a time when her entire life seemed to be going pear-shaped around her), it was also a paean to her husband, to their long marriage and life together. She didn't flinch from the hiccups that occur in any long-term relationship, but it was a wonderful marriage and a wonderful description of what I hope many people get to experience in their life.

Being a bit of a data-freak myself (and coming from a science background), I enjoyed her "research" side of things, when she got waylaid by facts and scientific papers about grief and mourning.

Being the sister of a doctor, I will never lend this to my sister, as she would loathe Didion's need to control everything in the hospital, and her positive smugness when she "won" the minor battles. While it was good reading about it (from the point of view of having been a patient myself, and dealing with the occasional doctor who treats you as if you have the IQ of a retarded amoeba), overall I had more sympathy with the medical profession in this case.

Finally, I thought this was a positively necessary book, given our modern society's need to sanitise death and to be rather embarrassed by other people's grief. I'm still embarrassed by other people's grief (it'll take more than one book to undo that bit of my anal buttoned-down personality), but I hope in the future I will not be mortified by my own grief, should I ever have to go through what Didion did. ( )

In an instant that she later calls “the ordinary instant,” Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne died. At that moment, Didion's life changed, and this book chronicles that first year of learning to live with that change.

When Dunne died, he and Didion had just returned from visiting their daughter, Quintana, at the hospital where she was in a coma after having been diagnosed with a flu that turned into a whole-body infection. As Didion mourns for her husband, she must also take care of her daughter, who spends the year going in and out of hospitals in New York and California.

Given the subject matter, one might expect something sentimental, full of emotional breakdowns and tears over gravestones, but Didion, the consummate ”cool customer,” takes a detached, journalistic approach to her own grief. The situation is highly emotionally charged, but Didion’s narration is not. But neither is it organized and completely coherent. When Didion’s mind wanders, so does the narrative. When a glimpse of a familiar piece of highway on a television commercial sends her mind into the dangerous vortex of memory, the narration follows.

One of the great things about this book is how it expresses so articulately the kinds of thoughts people might have when grieving. It is, of course, only one woman’s story, but it is her true story. Didion doesn’t divide her grief into tidy stages or have a clear moment of catharsis. It’s a messy process, and when the book ends, she hasn’t healed—the initial pain is just more distant.

See my complete review at my blog. ( )

This the memoir of the year following the death of the author's husband and the near-fatal illnesses her daughter survived. The first segments are chronologic and lead us to the author's account of her grief and mourning for her husband and their lives together. The daughter survives and does well. The author however must pass through the time of grieving, mourning and finally moving on with her changed life. Moving from the events surrounding his death to her memories of time past to finally beginning to write again are detailed with a sensation that is how she lived during this time. The last segments are difficult to understand, if only because she is giving a picture of the loss she feels and this picture is not a coherant nor comfortable one to see.

I nearly read this book without stopping. I knew the story - the book flaps tell you that. The part I found compelling was her ability to describe the chaos of these events and how they left her defenceless. These events happen to all people eventually, but when they occur we are never ready. The copy of the book I have has a hand-written note on the front sheets. The note was written from someone with a recent diagnosis of cancer to a person he cares dearly about. The writer of the note says many of the feelings he has are described "astoundingly real and powerfully" in the book. The note is correct.

Not a happy memoir, but one worth reading more than once. ( )

Wow! My librarian was right.

Too close too soon to write about the tragedy by author. I could not finish. Didion is one of my all time favorite authors. Through her I learned about writing and reading. ( )

This is a very well written examination of the nature of grief ( )

Raw honesty: The wave of grief takes on many forms. Grief rips into the physical, mental and the emotional well being of a person. Note: there is a long unrecognizable road thru grief before we switch into mourning. This is the reality of a loss and the effort of making a sense of life and of self in an after-loss world. I applaud this author**** ( )

This book was prompted by the sudden death of Didion's husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne. Her "magical thinking" includes the notion, at first not at all evident even to herself, that given the right set of circumstances or the right behavior on Didion's part, her husband will return. Didion attempts to make sense of her thoughts, however irrational. An intellectual enterprise with an emotional core, Didion's investigation is also a rumination on the nature of memory and grief. ( )

This book has earned a place on my top five list.

In her memoir, Joan Didion captures the year that followed her husband's sudden, unexpected death. She depicts the raw experience of grief so authentically, that the book may be appreciated in unique ways by those who have lost someone they deeply loved. During this same year, her daughter Quintana lies in a coma in an intensive care unit at a New York City hospital. The book takes us through the "crazy thinking" that invades Didion's psyche that year. For example, she worries that if she gives away her husband's shoes he won't have any to wear when he comes back. Some days, she's quite certain he'll be coming back. I understood completely what she meant.

Grief makes us temporarily insane, I think - and Didion, a brilliant thinker, helps normalize that experience. Even the smartest, most accomplished among us can't escape where our minds go when we've lost someone we've loved. Grief isn't simply about sadness, or about wearing black clothing. It's far deeper and darker than that. In some ways, it's a moment of true insanity.

It's a beautiful book, and in her portrayal of grief, I think she's hit perfection. What is difficult about this book, however, is that there's no happy ending. You want to hope that at the end things start to get better, easier - but they don't. Loss doesn't go away. In that sense, it's a dark book. But I found comfort in thinking, "wow, she understands!" ( )

Joan Didion, a contemporary author and play write tells of her feelings and experiences when her husband dies unexpectedly. For a book which dealt with loss and grief, I found this book extremely, peaceful. It is beautifully and honestly written. ( )

Heart-breaking. The idea of keeping your dead husband's shoes because when he comes back, he's going to need them just makes my heart crumble. ( )

http://amiralace.blogspot.com/2007/01... ( )

A memoir of this writer’s life in the year after her husband of nearly forty years, author John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack at the dinner table. At the time, their only child, Quintana, a newlywed, was hospitalized and on a ventilator, having developed a septic infection from pneumonia, and after her eventual release a month later, then developed blood clots which led her to be on anticoagulants, which then resulted in a cerebral hemorrhage and coma a few weeks later. As you can imagine, Joan’s life was thrown into utter turmoil, and while she maintained an outward calm, inside her body was compensating by failing to emotionally accept some things. For example, she refused to give away her husband’s last pair of shoes, because she felt he would be upset at not having any when he came back. She called her year of grief her year of magical thinking because she believed that many impossible things were utterly true.

The reader for this book set the tone very well, I thought, and it was difficult to stop listening much as people gather to watch the after-effects of a horrible accident. I have to say that I am glad it was short, though (only about 5 hours) or I might have stopped eventually. The tone was quite detached, almost cold, and at times I was irritated at the author’s description of privilege—the best doctors, the best hospitals, the best hotels—and I wondered how she would have handled her grief if she had been a poor housewife from Brooklyn with no money who had to find a job after her husband’s death. Still, it was an interesting book and very far my usual fare, and I can say that I felt it a worthwhile listen, although “enjoy” would be the wrong word. ( )

This is a beautifully written book about grief. I felt emotionally moved by it, and shall be seeking out other books by Joan Didion, and also John Gregory Dunne ( )

I started out fairly engaged with this memoir, but then lost interest from that point on. While I'm sure writing this was necessary for Didion to allow herself to begin the healing process associated with grief, I found much of it very off-topic and going off in directions that just didn't make the book seem very connected. Perhaps someone going through a similar period of grief would appreciate this more than I did. I was also very unsatisfied with the ending, expecting more of a resolution with her daughter Quintana. ( )

a memoir about the 12 month following her husbands (John Gregory Dunne) death while their daughter was also gravely ill; very well written but a little cerebral - I only got 2/3 of the way through it ( )

People I respect loved this book, but I didnt. Gloomy, repetitive story of Joan Didion's loss of her husband and eventually, her daughter. Still, it was a compelling reminder of the way that life can turn on a dime. ( )

I am not sure I liked this book. I had a hard time relating to it. (Yes, I am young and have yet to exprience any of the grief that the author obviously felt). The story was very sad, I admit, but that wasn't the part of the book that bothered me. I found the book quite pretentious. One thing that annoyed me was that she makes it quite clear that she and her husband are literary people who take literature seriously. If you haven't spent years in college didn't study literature, you propbably have no knowledge of these references. It was a bit tiresome. And these references would take her off onto stories of places she worked or lived for periods of time and sometimes I forgot what she began talking about in the first place.

Also, all of the medical references. She would go on for pages about all kinds of medical termonology that I just had to skip because I didn't understand a word of it. What was the point? I think maybe she was trying to justify how and why her husband died and what happend to Quintana. It was really actually boring to me.

Another thing was the incessant name-dropping. It was as if every single famous person they knew was mentioned in this book. But there was never a meaningful story to go along with it.. Its obvious she wanted to make sure everyone knew that she ran in a famous circle. It was really annoying. ( )