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cepbreed's review against another edition
4.0
"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."
Joan Didion is a master of her craft and yet this book managed to disappoint me. I think I went into this with such lofty expectations. I had my first true conscious experience with grief in May of 2022 and have ruminated intensely on that experience and my reactions to it in the past year and a half. Unconsciously I was expecting Joan Didion to serve me some sort of world-altering revelation on a silver platter. I wanted desperately to understand myself and my grief more and I did not get that. Even though I'm conscious of this that doesn't change how I feel about this book. I can acknowledge this is a chronicle of her personal experience but that does nothing to abate my feelings of discontentment.
But I truly do want to praise Didion. After reading a couple of her essays I grew to love her style and that didn't change throughout this reading experience. She just knows when to zoom in and out and I am so envious. There's some part of me that is pessimistic. I will never reach that level of intrinsic writing ability and I fear that my writing career ends here. At university I'm competent but in a world Joan Didion has existed in is there any place for me? The other side of my brain is also inspired by her works. Something about the way she writes makes me want to write. That conflict is tearing me apart.
The only other complaint I have is that she gratuitously name-drops. I understand her life has been star-studded and marked by remarkable experiences at notable locations but at some point it adds nothing to what she is trying to convey. There is no need to know some of these details and the specificity of it all sometimes overshadows the plot.
Graphic: Medical content, Chronic illness, Death, and Grief
praisethee's review against another edition
5.0
Moderate: Grief, Medical content, Chronic illness, Death, Injury/Injury detail, Mental illness, and Medical trauma
rachthecreator's review against another edition
4.5
Graphic: Death, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Grief, Blood, Chronic illness, and Medical content
anoushka05's review against another edition
4.25
Graphic: Death, Medical content, Terminal illness, Chronic illness, Grief, and Medical trauma
alexisgarcia's review against another edition
3.5
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Chronic illness, Medical content, Death, Grief, Blood, and Medical trauma
my_plant_library's review against another edition
4.25
Graphic: Death, Medical content, and Grief
Moderate: Chronic illness
bookgirllife's review against another edition
4.25
I had heard many wonderful things about Didion’s writing prior to reading this book, but none of it prepared me for the very physical experience of reading this book. Didion writes from a deeply intimate and transparent perspective, even as she explores the medical and psychological side of grief. In The Year of Magical Thinking Didion ruminates on her loss as she tries to come to terms with it. The way she does this is not linear, is not through a five (or seven) step process. “Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life” as Didion wrote in this book, and that is exactly how she writes about it. Those waves are felt through her writing, with a slow rise as she endevours to understand grief, the suddenness of feeling the loss in startlingly ordinary moments, the regression into her “magical thinking.”
While grief is an overarching, sometimes all-consuming, sometimes entirely (and intentionally) neglected, theme in The Year of Magical Thinking, motherhood was another strong theme. In particular, mothering through grief while her child was chronically ill. Didion portrays the challenges of continuation without her husband with great vulnerability. It made me think about how my mother would say, following the death of her parents, how she could only go on because she had her children to take care of. It made me think of the necessity for distraction in order to move forward.
I was struck by her insights into the act of grieving viewed as self-pity and the loneliness of grief. She also wrote on the subject of feelings of betrayal and guilt of bereavement, and also on the meaninglessness of death. We try to find some solace in meaning, in things happen for a reason. It is difficult to reconcile that sometimes, there is no reason. It's just what happened. It didn't serve any greater purpose and you're left trying to make peace with that while making peace with your loss.
I found The Year of Magical Thinking to be very interesting, which feels weird to say about someone else’s grief. Didion wrote this book because it's what she had to do to process her grief, to mourn her husband. I am eager to read more Joan Didion in the future after this as an introduction to her work.
Graphic: Grief
Moderate: Chronic illness and Death
dudette's review against another edition
3.0
Graphic: Death of parent, Grief, Medical content, Death, and Chronic illness
Minor: Murder and Suicide
deenmachine's review against another edition
3.0
Graphic: Death and Chronic illness
dancefever's review against another edition
3.75
This was a really interesting read and very different to anything I've read before. This, coupled with the fact it is a personal memoir, makes it very difficult to review. I've not read anything long-form by Didion before and I found I really like her style. I am very drawn to books that deal with memory in a tangible sense of objects/paraphernalia and this certainly does that. I was perhaps a bit confused by the seemingly endless scope for detail in some areas and vagueness in others: though obviously I know this is a book about her husband John's death, the first half or so of the book seems to deal a lot with Didion's daughter Quintana's ongoing illness and then seems to completely forget about it by the second half of the book. The occasional forays into medical jargon and lengthy quotes from journals and studies were perhaps a bit alienating: they didn't lend themselves to the personal reflective style throughout the rest of the book, and yet weren't extensive enough to transform the book into investigative journalism. I do appreciate however that this paints a picture of her obsessive, manic searching for answers after her husband's death. The meditative layering of time, of phrases, of memories of years spent with her husband reminded me of a quote from Anne Carson in her poem "The Glass Essay":
Overall I enjoyed reading this. Didion has a beautifully evocative and tender way of painting relationships and memories, though I felt the book began to meander by the end and then simply tailed off (though I suppose grief doesn't really have an "end" as we would like it to). 3.75 stars
Graphic: Chronic illness, Death, Grief, Medical content, and Terminal illness