The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner Paperback – February 13, 2007

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.

I’ve read Joan Didion’s works for years. This is the most beautiful. It is a tribute to her marriage and to John..

The Year of Magical Thinking is sad, tragic, amazing, incisive, and at times, satirical. Only Didion could write with such courage and candor about the deaths of her husband (you sit down to dinner and your life changes forever) and daughter, who had slipped into a coma the week before and died less than two years later. Known for her incisive attention to detail, she leads the reader to believe no stone has been left unturned, then pulls out a plate coving a deep well of personal affairs. In a remarkable aside, Didion writes that she doesn’t know the rules of grammar, a pretty stunning reveal for a National Book Award winner. To compensate, the chronicler of some of the most significant events of the 1960-70s says she writes according to the way the narrative feels and sounds to her ear.

Joan Didion's _The Year of Magical Thinking_ says so right on the cover, with 'Joan' getting the biggest font and 'The Year of' the smallest. There's a nice family picture on the back, the author and her daughter both glancing sideways, her husband gazing at the camera dead-on, an interesting, moon-faced sort of man in a tweed jacket, the kind of guy with whom I'd like to drink a scotch. Malibu is one hell of a zipcode, the book writing business surely has been kind to Ms. Didion."Life changes fast / Life changes in the instant / You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." This is one of those little quotes that strikes with the force of truth the moment you read it, that's why they put it on the back of the book. It's like that book re the theory of incompleteness, how can you not buy it, you know nothing's ever complete. Turns out, the thing is a whole lot of teutonic philosophy and math, yuck. Same thing with life changing in an instant, on the back of a book about disease death grief & loss, it's must-see tv, it says take me to the check-out, you're out of the store with it in a bag before you remember that you were looking for the feel good dvd of the century.Life doesn't change in the instant, however. Those clever jacket designers at Knopf saw fit to leave off the epigram's last line, "The question of self-pity." Self-pity and its questions tend tb the kiss of death when it comes to selling books. Me, living an unwritten cancer memoir as I am, let me tell you, self-pity is the corpse at the feast, it's the pedophile uncle at the wedding, it's the AOL prepended to Time-Warner.The middle part of the book requires further reading. The journey ends, as so many others do, with a note on the type. The book was set in Bodoni, a typeface named after Giamattista Bodoni, although how it differs from Times New Roman is a mystery to me.Notes on the type always make me feel a bit sad. It's like learning that every single lover you've ever had was faking from the word go, all that earth-moving was a pathetic lie. Admit it, you were unaware of the Bodoni typeface the whole damn time, reading in bed, reading on the train, broad daylight, the red shades of twilight and dawn, the stolen sideways glances as you cruise down the commuter lanes of this great land: not a once did the great hand of Bodoni reveal itself to you. It's as if you are at dinner, a piece of chicken in your windpipe, watching your life drifting drifting away from you like a cliff from a suicide... as your vision ebbs and your brief moment on stage fades to black, you plantively look from spouse to offspring: they hold their forks poised above their meals as if interrupted, watching blandly, as if you are of no real concern, a dropped napkin, a spilled glass -- thankfully, only water! -- nothing more than an after-image by now. So the hovering is-everything-okay waiter saves your day, the half-chewed morsel fires across the room like the punchline of a bad joke, the light returns with the blood to your brain, and now you know the question if not the answer, the question of self-pity, you don't need no friggin Bodoni to answer this one.---------This review was set in MS-Unicode Courier New, handcrafted by the famous patriot Sam Adams, whose typefacing career was tragically abbreviated by liver troubles up the wazoo.