The Year of Magical Thinking
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...
- Pages
- 53
- Audiobook
- 1 hr 28 min
- First published
- October 4, 2005
- Language
- English
- Edition
- Audiobook
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Reviews
Finished December 12, 2024
I just couldn’t get into this at all. Early on, I sympathized with Joan over the loss of her husband and her daughter’s illness, but the book quickly devolved into too many unrelated stories, an overwhelming amount of medical jargon, and incessant name-dropping of famous people she knew. I kept spacing out and wishing it would end. A 5 hour audiobook took me all day to finish because I kept pausing it and not wanting to go back. That said, there were a few moments that did resonate with me and gave me the permission to admit that I’m still processing my own grief, in my way. “The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place.” This was pretty popular on Tiktok earlier in the year, which is what led me to put it on my TBR, having not read anything from Didion previously. I waited almost six months for it to be available on Libby, and, overall, it was a letdown.