The Year of Magical Thinking

I am not sure what I can say about Joan Didion’s non-fiction book The Year of Magical Thinking that hasn’t been said before in a review. The book is famous, a masterpiece even, for a reason—it is complex, masterful, reflective, and beautifully sad. Instead, I wish to offer more of a reading guide to the piece. 

If you haven’t read the book, here’s what it’s about: Writers and couple John Dunne and Joan Didion watch their only child, Quintana, develop pneumonia and septic shock several days before Christmas in 2003. She is admitted to the hospital in critical condition and falls unconscious. A few days later on December 30, 2003, while Quintana is still comatose, John is struck at the dinner table by a massive coronary. He dies instantly. After several weeks, Quintana regains her health. She travels to California with her husband Gerry where she collapses in LAX. She is rushed to the hospital where she is diagnosed with a massive hematoma. Quintana, once again, falls unconscious and gravely ill but later recovers.

Didion attempts to make sense of these events, and attempts to understand death. She researches death and the medical problems her loved ones suffer. She turns to the literature. She is a smart, grounded woman, but a part of her still expects John to come back. It is this expectation of his return that she refers to as her “magical thinking.”

Clearly, this book is a rough book to read. It has been on my list for about two years now, as I am quite a fan of Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking is a book that people always talked about in my writing classes in college. It’s an important book in terms of style—Didion never falls into being overly sappy or sentimental, which is a challenged giving the subject matter. (Who could blame her if she did get sentimental or sappy?) If you are going to write a book about death, this is a model of how to do it effectively.

But, like I said, all of this has been said before about The Year of Magical Thinking, so I am going to give two pieces of advice to the reader of this book, based on my own experience. First of all, read it when you must, when it fits for your life. There were other times in my life when The Year of Magical Thinking could have been of use to me, but I decided to pick it up now. The book made me scared of all of the terrible things that can possibly happen. I think if I had been reading this at a rougher period in my life, I could have related to the book more. But instead it just made me nervous. I read the book quickly, trying to get through it so that I could escape the parts of it that made me uncomfortable.

Which brings me to my second piece of advice: Read this one slowly. Read it carefully; absorb it; pay attention to how Didion copes through language. I remember in “The White Album” she writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This is what Didion is doing in The Year of Magical Thinking. She constantly puts the events of John’s death and Quintana’s illnesses into a story, into a timeline. She slows down. She takes the time she needs to make sense of the events in her life. So when you read it, don’t power through it. Take it nice and slow.

In summation, read The Year of Magical Thinking when it is necessary to your own understanding of your own circumstances, and read it slowly. Do not read it like I read it—fast, wanting to know what happens next but also trying to escape the difficult subject matter of death that Didion forces her reader to confront.