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 The Year of Magical Thinking :: 140004314X
Description
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From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year’s Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
Reviews
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Author: Guest
Coping with the grief of her husband's sudden death and the near-death-hospitalization of their only child, Didion wrote this book. As a writer, her instincts were to try sorting the experience into words to make sense of it all.
Excerpts from books of poetry, definitions of death, classical literature, and medical explanations litter the account. She meshes these with her feelings and telling and retelling of the events. Then she mixes in her friends' and doctors' accounts of the events. Even so, she can't turn it into anything constructive or understandable for herself. Her loss is so great that her thinking remains jumbled and her actions at times illogical.
Perhaps that is the wisdom of this book; that it shows the efforts of the bereaved person to understand what has happened and the failure to make sense of something (death) that has no reason.
It's interesting as a personal account, yet it was discouraging to me, as the reader, trying to find words of wisdom about the experience of loss.
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Author: Guest
A beautiful book for anyone who has lost a loved one. I just lost my dear husband the end of December. In June 1973 my beautiful daughter, Pat, passed away after battling cancer for five years. In 1977, my first husband died of a heart attack. Everything Ms. Didion described hit home with me. A must read.
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Author: Guest
Awesome book - gives an insight into the coping mechanisms of human beings in the face of tragedy.
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Author: Guest
The negative reviews for this book make no sense to me. It is not Joan Didion's job to write a "how to deal with grief" self-help book (the vast majority of which are complete garbage, anyway.) You're not supposed to be reading this book to find some deep insight into the nature of loss. This is a professional writer's expression of HER thoughts, HER experience. It's as valid as anyone else's experience, and I was entranced. And the name-dropping? Didion has famous people in her life, get over it. What's next: someone will say that Didion doesn't know how to grieve?
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Author: Guest
Have never read the authors fiction works and bought this book simply because I had heard such wonderful things about the book via friends at hospice and the support group I attend sporadically for widows and widowers on Wednesday evenings.
The book is indeed magical and very thought provoking. Especially like how she puts words to page to share what it is like to become a widow or parent of a child who has died. It isn't an easy journey. But like most journeys its worth the effort required.
As she writes in Chapter 17, page 188. 'Grief turns out to be a place non of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes'. This is so on target!!
Page 192 'People in grief think a great deal about self pity. We worry about it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it.' We understand the average most of have to 'dwelling on it.' Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation'.
On page 199 chapter 18 she writes 'At the time I began writing these pages, in October 2004, I still did not understand how or why or when John died. I had been there'. She writes a lot of reading and re reading all the medical paper work trying to make sense of everything, and expecting her husband to walk thru the door at any minute, to the extent that she was willing to donate his clothes but not his shoes to charity, because if he did return he would need the shoes that fit well, whereas he could get a pair of slacks, shirts etc more quickly. This is interesting because I and other widows I know have all held on to our husbands shoes...just in case.
I so appreciate her honesty in sharing the mental tricks we deal with in reading medical records but not really believing ones spouse is dead, gone. There is something so surreal to losing ones spouse that brings a slap in the face reality to the idea of the think veil between life and death. As I stayed with Ron after he died, waiting for the tissue and organ donation folks to arrive I kept thinking of how Ron was 'gone' but also very much with us. Thankfully being the free spirit that I am I took photos and even asked for a stethoscope to listen for myself to his chest, neck etc for any signs of life. Much like the author who writes about how she was taught to use a mirror to check for even the faintest of breath from the nostrils.
Cannot recommend this book enough. Especially to those who have not yet lost a spouse, because its a great tool on what to expect and how not to beat yourself up.
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