Joan Didion
Paperback | Pages: 227 pages Rating: 3.89 | 132194 Users | 9879 Reviews
Details Based On Books The Year of Magical Thinking
| Title | : | The Year of Magical Thinking |
| Author | : | Joan Didion |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Vintage International (US / Canada) |
| Pages | : | Pages: 227 pages |
| Published | : | February 13th 2007 by Vintage (first published September 1st 2005) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Autobiography. Memoir. Biography. Biography Memoir |
Rendition In Favor Of Books The Year of Magical Thinking
'An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief.'From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion 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.
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."
Itemize Books To The Year of Magical Thinking
| Original Title: | The Year of Magical Thinking |
| ISBN: | 1400078431 (ISBN13: 9781400078431) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Setting: | United States of America |
| Literary Awards: | National Book Award for Nonfiction (2005), Puddly Award for Nonfiction (2006) |
Rating Based On Books The Year of Magical Thinking
Ratings: 3.89 From 132194 Users | 9879 ReviewsEvaluation Based On Books The Year of Magical Thinking
There were many beautiful and moving passages in this book, but there are also some tedious aspects. I feel like a brute for criticizing what is essentially Didion's grief diary after her husband died, but some complaints have to be made. Didion gets too bogged down in the hours and days and minutiae of her husband's autopsy report. Also, parts felt like an academic paper because she kept quoting medical studies -- all part of the attempt to make sense of the autopsy. Those kinds of details areDisclaimer: Being fresh into the grieving process myself, you may want to skip this review and head onto others. Undoubtedly I'll purge my grief in a review about a book on grief. You've been warned. Right off the top I will say this for the book: raw, powerful, honest, amazing. If you have any interest in the grief process, READ THIS BOOK. The only criticism that I might have is that there's a lot of name dropping. Insert famous names and some fancy locations (Beverly Hills, Malibu), talk about
Amen to that.
Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of waves. I cannot remember when I was last so moved by a book. It covers a sad subject, that of death with the subsequent grief and mourning periods but it amazed me with its lucidity of a woman who wrote this book a year after her husbands death.
Someone gave me this when it came out. No clue why they thought I'd like it, as I've never read Didion and almost never read popular nonfiction and
This is a hard book for me to review, as I know my own personal experience will be foremost. A big thank you to a wonderful friend who sent this to me after the loss of my own partner three weeks ago. So yes, this book is about grief and loss. It is Didion's own personal journey after the loss of her husband. The first lines in her memoir begin..."Life changes fast.Life changes in an instant.You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.The question of self-pity."Those words resonated with
"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends". Didion uses this statement throughout the book, and this is a statement, or some varied version of it, that has touched or may touch many of us at some point in time. The thought of it; we suppress it, bury it just out of view of our consciousness, but we know it's there, that we may have to face it head on someday.That's what Joan Didion does in this book when she is faced with her husbands sudden death. This is how she existed, how she
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