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A review by meemawreads
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
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