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lunastortaa's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content, Medical trauma, Death, Grief, and Panic attacks/disorders
praisethee's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
sad
fast-paced
5.0
I loved how I was practically in the mind of the author. Although it seems like it's a little all of over the place and hard to keep track of in reality this perfectly depict the author's mind and thought through the toughest time in her life.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Grief, Medical content, Chronic illness, Death, Injury/Injury detail, Mental illness, and Medical trauma
breegoux's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
2.5
The title really does not capture what this book is about, nor somehow does the synopsis? I went into it expecting to glean something from the grief in the year following Didion's husband's death and her daughter's hospitalization and instead mainly just learned about these two events. While there are thoughts and reflections on the nuance of grief there is no "magical thinking" as the title might lead you to believe. It's perhaps a reference to the cognitive dissonance grief puts you in that Didion highlights her own experience with, but this I wouldn't term magical. Having experienced more loss and grief in my life in this past year than I ever have (or ever want to again) I was just expecting more. It didn't tell me any more than what I already knew or provide any hindsight. It just was, which is fine, but I feel shortchanged by how the book was pitched
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Grief, and Medical trauma
isscnls's review against another edition
It's kind of interesting, and a little disarming, to read someone with such a rational, straightforward mind talk about the experience of grieving, which is an absolutely irrational, complicated thing. I think that makes it more heartbreaking, the making sense of things that cannot be in any way made sense of. This realization only came of course because I read one other Didion work before this. The contrast between that previous book and this one is unapparent in terms of language, style, wording — but, to use the word again, disarming in terms of the surety one exudes and one doesn't.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical trauma, Terminal illness, Death, Blood, Medical content, and Grief
rachthecreator's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Grief, Blood, Chronic illness, and Medical content
anoushka05's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Medical content, Terminal illness, Chronic illness, Grief, and Medical trauma
clarabooksit's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
2.25
I’ve been really into reading books on grief and loss, especially memoirs, and the number one recommended book on all the lists is THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING by Joan Didion. So, I finally read it.
It wasn’t for me.
To be fair, I was avoiding it less because of its popularity but because I don’t like Didion’s perspective. I haven’t read any of her fiction but I’ve read a lot of her cultural criticism essays on literature and film, and I’ve always found her elitist and out-of-touch. This book wasn’t the exception.
While I respect her intellect and her writing is undeniably smart, her complete lack of awareness, let alone acknowledgement, of her overwhelming privilege—white, wealthy, tastemaker for the cultural elite—is grating, frustrating and sometimes offensive. Even in a book about the year following the sudden and tragic death of her husband, she can’t help but name drop and throw around her wealthy lifestyle, never once reflecting on her privilege. It makes her very difficult to relate to.
I wanted to like this book. The way it’s written brilliantly reflects the way grief alters the way we think and how memory can fail us. There were moments that hit me in the gut with their poignancy. And it feels unfair to judge how someone expresses their grief, but overall this didn’t work for me.
Memoirs I’d recommend instead: A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung, Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, and Crying In H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
It wasn’t for me.
To be fair, I was avoiding it less because of its popularity but because I don’t like Didion’s perspective. I haven’t read any of her fiction but I’ve read a lot of her cultural criticism essays on literature and film, and I’ve always found her elitist and out-of-touch. This book wasn’t the exception.
While I respect her intellect and her writing is undeniably smart, her complete lack of awareness, let alone acknowledgement, of her overwhelming privilege—white, wealthy, tastemaker for the cultural elite—is grating, frustrating and sometimes offensive. Even in a book about the year following the sudden and tragic death of her husband, she can’t help but name drop and throw around her wealthy lifestyle, never once reflecting on her privilege. It makes her very difficult to relate to.
I wanted to like this book. The way it’s written brilliantly reflects the way grief alters the way we think and how memory can fail us. There were moments that hit me in the gut with their poignancy. And it feels unfair to judge how someone expresses their grief, but overall this didn’t work for me.
Memoirs I’d recommend instead: A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung, Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, and Crying In H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content, Medical trauma, Death, and Grief
Moderate: Murder
Minor: Suicide
nenya's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.75
While this book is absolutely beautifully written (honestly, Didion is a goddess) and I really did like the non chronological way it was laid out, it sometimes (partially) felt a bit boring. However I do realize that these parts were important to her and as such absolutely need to be read.Â
Didion gives an honest and thought provoking insight into a grieving person‘s mind and struggles while also delivering some insanely impactful quotes.Â
Didion gives an honest and thought provoking insight into a grieving person‘s mind and struggles while also delivering some insanely impactful quotes.Â
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Medical content, Abandonment, Medical trauma, and Death
meemawreads's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
2.0
Woof, y'all. I picked this one up because it was available and Joan Didion is someone whose name I'd heard enough that her books were always on my list to try. I think she's an excellent writer, her memory for detail is frankly intimidating. In comparing my own memory I thought, "Do I have dementia? At 35?" I still want to give some of her fiction a go, but man is her nonfiction not for me!
This book is about the year after Didion's husband dies in front of her of a massive heart attack while their adult daughter is in the ICU. Hard stuff, those with medical trauma and grief sensitivities take care. I don't think this is a bad book, it's just written from such an extreme point of unexamined privilege that I couldn't relate. She attempts to describe something as human as the denial of grief, the emptiness of mourning a person who your instincts still reach out for multiple times a day. There are profound sentences throughout. BUT she uses her entirely unrelatable life circumstances to describe them: which of their houses they were in for this memory, flying to Paris or Honolulu or Milan in that memory, calling their connections at the NY and LA Times for his obituary. This was written in 2005, before conversation about wealth inequality and privilege was common, so I'm not calling Didion a bad feminist for writing honestly about her circumstances... I just can't connect. I'll never have memories full of coast-hopping on private planes, multiple homes, jetting to Hawaii to write a film. The piles of unrelatable anecdotes water down the universality of her grief message. Very out of touch. Two taters 🥔🥔/🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔
This book is about the year after Didion's husband dies in front of her of a massive heart attack while their adult daughter is in the ICU. Hard stuff, those with medical trauma and grief sensitivities take care. I don't think this is a bad book, it's just written from such an extreme point of unexamined privilege that I couldn't relate. She attempts to describe something as human as the denial of grief, the emptiness of mourning a person who your instincts still reach out for multiple times a day. There are profound sentences throughout. BUT she uses her entirely unrelatable life circumstances to describe them: which of their houses they were in for this memory, flying to Paris or Honolulu or Milan in that memory, calling their connections at the NY and LA Times for his obituary. This was written in 2005, before conversation about wealth inequality and privilege was common, so I'm not calling Didion a bad feminist for writing honestly about her circumstances... I just can't connect. I'll never have memories full of coast-hopping on private planes, multiple homes, jetting to Hawaii to write a film. The piles of unrelatable anecdotes water down the universality of her grief message. Very out of touch. Two taters 🥔🥔/🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical trauma
Moderate: Grief
alexisgarcia's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
3.5
this was such an interesting book due to the intense feelings of grief paired with feeling numb.Â
Content Warnings
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Chronic illness, Medical content, Death, Grief, Blood, and Medical trauma