Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
by Joan Didion
I have read Joan Didion's fiction and nonfiction, been moved and provoked by her, surprised by her strange sense of timing and truth. I did not know what the subject matter was of this bestseller when I picked it up. I just felt in the mood for some Joan Didion.
This is the story of the year after Joan Didion lost her husband, the award winning novelist John Gregory Dunne, the man she shared everything with for 40 years. Joan writes, "This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death."
The book begins with the words, "Life Changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity." One night after Joan and John came home from the hospital where their only daughter lie in a coma, John Dunne collapsed and died of a heart attack.
I cannot imagine the pain, but Joan Didion helps me. "People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. . . The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness." Joan talks about one day when she was sitting in John's office after he died, she mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary he always left open. "When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last look up, what had he been thinking?"
It doesn't feel right to say I enjoyed The Year of Magical Thinking, but it was the most honest voice I have read in a long time. I read it from start to finish in a weekend and felt more alive when I closed it. I will keep this book, either to share with a friend or re-read. I sense I will need this wisdom again sometime. I highly recommend The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. On the Book Beat for KSL Newsradio, I'm Amanda Dickson.
