The Year of Magical Thinking

By: Joan Didion

Narrated by: Barbara Caruso

National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2005

"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.

The weeks and months that followed "cut loose any fixed idea I had about death, about illness, about probability and luck...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience. Her portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad, will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, a wife, or a child.

Listen to Joan Didion's full-hour interview with Charlie Rose.©2005 Joan Didion (P)2005 HighBridge Company

Critic reviews

• 2005 Audie Award Nominee, Biography/Memoir
• National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee, Autobiography, 2005

"Many will greet this taut, clear-eyed memoir of grief as a long-awaited return to the terrain of Didion's venerated, increasingly rare personal essays....This is an indispensable addition to Didion's body of work and a lyrical, disciplined entry in the annals of mourning literature." (Publishers Weekly)
"The Year of Magical Thinking is not a downer. On the contrary. Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative." (The New York Times)

once you've been there, you know

This book can be extremely comforting to anyone who lives through the death of a loved one. I can see from reading other reviews that some people don't get it; 3 years ago I wouldn't have either. When you're in "the twilight zone" of grief, you appear to be recovering from loss in a straight-forward, linear fashion--from the outside. Didion captures the jumbled emotions, guilt, irrational thought patterns, dreams, paralysis and flashbacks that she and others have lived through with the presence of mind of a gutsy, professional writer. Thanks, Joan, I'm not crazy after all.

Magical Thinking

THis was the first audiobook I've ever listened to and it was an excellent introduction to the genre. The reader, Barbara Caruso, was wonderful. I listened while on jury duty and I'm sure the other members of the jury pool must have wondered why that woman sitting in the corner of the room was listening to her ipod and weeping.

Excellent

Grief has never been so cutting, truthful and eloquent as this book shows. Ms. Didion's account of the year after her husband's sudden death is an elegant, sentimental journey that those shed to light all those feelings of despair, loneliness and emptiness that a death of a dear one cause on the living.

Overproduced: why the music?

I've seen the author interviewed a few times and I didn't feel like this was her voice, her presentation of her own work. I also didn't feel like spirit of a number of passages was captured. Finally, there is music fading in & out at chapter breaks. this was terribly distracting and the sound mix was bad so narrator was competing with music.

Disappointing

I was informed this was the ultimate work on grief. The only thing it taught me was how different grief could be for individuals. Disappointing and unhelpful. If you are looking for a way to work through your grief, this is not the book you.

I listen to this many times a year.

Narrator is perfect. The emotional level is always how I would imagine that the author intended. I listened to this many times before my own child was in a coma, and now I really relate to the year of magical thinking.

Beautiful and heartbreaking

I recognized many of my own thoughts and feelings in this book, and it brought me both tears and comfort.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Beautifully written memoir of the year following her loving husband John’s unexpected death which was made all the more difficult as their only daughter was deathly ill and in the hospital. The audio is extremely well done.

Highly recommend

I love the narrator of this book. The story of Joan and her husband, John and their life together was an amazing life. Her grief is understandable and we have a right to grieve our losses. She is a wonderful author. A must read for anyone who has lost a loved one.

Loving Joan Didion. A Year of Magical Thinking

This small book is magical. Anyone who has lost a family member will say "oh the same thing happened to me." Having lost too many people in my family I found this book at times funny, because I did the same thing, sad, not maudlin and educational. I have always liked Joan Didion's books but this one is my favorite. She recalls the small details one would experience after a death. She could not give his shoes away because he might come back and need them. That is a perfect example of magical thinking whether you are thinking like a sociologist or a psychologist or have lost a loved one.

Joan Didion's book Blue Nights is about the death of her daughter. I think of them as companion books but not alike. Read A Year of Magical Thinking. Sometimes it will make you smile.