The Year of Magical Thinking

As a writer-turned-editor, this book has inspired me to write again. Didion's use of repetition is masterful. And the reader (I have to remember to look up who that was) was a perfect match. I've debated whether to recommend people read the book or listen to the audiotape. I was clearly moved by the audio experience...but I just went out and bought the book so I can experience it in that way, and go back and refer to especially poignant passages. To the person on this site who said it was too impersonal...she clearly was doing the laundry or something while listening and wasn't paying attention. You don't have to read someone's resume to know who they are. In Didion's writing, she reveals personalities through stories, through memories...images of John reading the paper, his lists, their travels, gardenia trapped in the pool filter. This book is amazing.

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Wow...nothing lighthearted or uplifting here. But Joan Didion emerses you in her very private journey through a grief-filled year. I was in a bit of a meloncholic state after finishing the book, but in strange way, felt better off having read it.

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A masterpiece. A novelist details the events during the awful year that her husband and her daughter died. So harrowing, I had to turn off the CD occasionally. But the book did what good books should do: Make you feel that you yourself lived through the experience and learned from it. This is a book that will be read by people far into the future.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is a good chronicle of grief, mixed in this case with the trauma of watching a daughter come very close to death. The loss of her husband and near loss of her daughter at the same time gave Didion a lot of material about which to write. In her usual form, however, it is all about the author, who takes herself very, very seriously.

While I found this book to be sad, it resonated with me since I recently lost a young niece. I often wonder how her mother is handling the loss because she hides her feelings. This memoir seemed open and honest; I enjoyed it.

This was an incredibly difficult book to listen to, but well worth sticking it out through the most difficult parts. The things that make life meaningful - love, partnership, family, children - are also the things that when lost, make life not worth living. I really respect Ms. Didion for writing this book, and I greatly admire her ability to really engage the reader in her very private experience without making it self-indulgent.

This is a very well written story. It was very insightful to hear what Joan Didion went through when her life was taken over by events beyond her control. I have never read anyone else who allowed us such intimate passage into their experiences involving the death of a loved one.

I really regret listening to this audiobook. I should have READ this book. It is too intimate and personal to experience it in this passive way. Reading it, I would have been more actively engaged in the story and it is how Didion intended for us to experience it.Listening to the story somehow seems...disrespectful. I have heard Didion speak before and this narrator, although I'm sure tried to do a good job, was more annoying than effective, inserting emotion wherever she wanted. Offering up "matter of facts" and coy humor, in her intonations when I felt it was not needed or called for. And the music! Very bad taste.

I really loved the narrator, but the story was really boring and kind of depressing. I was glad when it ended. I always listen all the way through just in case I might miss a great story, but this one wasn't worth the time.

This is an excellent book; it is more musing than straight-forward, more philosophy than memoir. Yet the memories of a life shared through Didion's writing educate, teach, and touch the reader.