A Review of The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion By Cathy Boomer
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is one of the most honest, disorienting, and ultimately redemptive books ever written about grief. Published in 2005, it chronicles the year following the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, who died of a heart attack at their dinner table on December 30, 2003 — the same night their daughter, Quintana, lay critically ill in a nearby hospital. The timing was cruel beyond measure, and Didion does not flinch from telling us exactly how cruel it was.
What makes this memoir extraordinary is Didion’s willingness to document the irrational mind of a grieving person with surgical precision. She obsessively returns to the details of that night. She cannot give away her husband’s shoes because some part of her believes he will need them when he returns. She revisits conversations, retraces trips, and searches for the moment she might have changed what happened. She calls this “magical thinking” — the deeply human, deeply desperate belief that if we just think the right thoughts or perform the right rituals, we can reverse the irreversible.
As someone who has spent years helping families think through end-of-life planning, I was struck by how profoundly The Year of Magical Thinking validates what so many grieving people feel but are afraid to say out loud: I think I am going crazy. Didion names this feeling with unflinching honesty. She is not going crazy. She is grieving. And grief, she shows us, looks a great deal like madness from the inside.
This is perhaps the book’s greatest gift. Didion, one of America’s most celebrated writers, admits to the magical thinking, the bargaining, the inability to read her own words, the terror of the ordinary. If Joan Didion can fall apart this completely and this visibly, then surely the rest of us are permitted to as well. There is enormous comfort in that permission.
Didion’s prose is spare and relentless — short declarative sentences that build into something devastating. She draws on psychology, literature, and medicine to try to understand what is happening to her, and in doing so, she gives language to what is often unspeakable. This is not a book about accepting death gracefully. It is a book about the war the mind wages against acceptance, and how long that war can last.
I recommend The Year of Magical Thinking to anyone who has lost someone they loved, and to anyone who will — which is all of us. It will not comfort you in easy ways. But it will make you feel less alone in the wilderness of loss, and sometimes, that is exactly enough.
The Year of Magical Thinking deserves every award it has received and every reader it finds.
