Book Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

This last Christmas, I participated in my first ever Secret Santa Book Exchange, which was way more fun than I anticipated! I received a book I would likely have never picked for myself–The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, which I personally think is a lot of fun. It’s interesting to read something picked for me instead of picked by me!

I went through a roller-coaster of thoughts reading this one. Now that I have finished, I’m truly not sure if I actually enjoyed it, or if the writing was just so captivating that I couldn’t put it down.

Let me start over.

Joan Didion was an incredibly brilliant writer–she wrote numerous pieces for various news outlets, as well as novels, non-fiction books, and even screenplays. To say she was a wordsmith is an understatement. She knew how to keep her reader engaged. That is true for The Year of Magical Thinking as well.

I kept wanting to read. But I can’t say I particularly resonated with her story. I shared with a friend that it reminded me of an accident on the other side of the highway–you can’t help but look, or in this case, read. This could be because I haven’t experienced grief in the way she did. Or, it could be because I saw the helplessness of a woman searching for something that only God can fill.

I realized I wouldn’t really be able to resonate with this story when I was nearly done with it. This story is about the death of her husband and the subsequent year of grief that was filled with its own complications, the biggest being the hospitalization of her only daughter. It is deeply personal to her thoughts, her mourning, and her memories of the love of her life.

Near the end of the book, she wrote:

“I remember despising the book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death, Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious about, her ‘self-pity,’ her ‘whining,’ her ‘dwelling on it.’ Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn.”

This very well could be the true reason this didn’t resonate with me. Not only do I have a very limited experience with grief revolving around the death of a loved one, but I am also happily married to the love of my life–we’re still young with a lot of life to live (and yes, I am aware that doesn’t guarantee tomorrow)! Maybe someday I will look back at this book and understand it a little better.

But…

Maybe I won’t.

The second reason I wasn’t sure I could really resonate with this book was because of her deep focus on her husband, instead of God. She alluded to her faith in this book with repeated references to being Episcopalian. She commented on having The Book of Common Prayer easily accessible. But, the way in which she wrote lacked a dependence on the only One who can fulfill our souls completely.

I don’t really know where she stood with God when her husband died. And I don’t claim to say that if my husband died tomorrow, I wouldn’t be a mess. I’m sure I would be. But I do think I have a profound trust in God that would help me through the adversity of a death built through practice in the good times and rougher moments of life.

This book isn’t one I’d tell you to run out and grab. It just didn’t hit me in a way that I thought would be helpful for someone going through their own grief experience. I think this book was more for her than for an audience–a way to process the year after her husband’s death. But I don’t think I would tell someone grieving to read this. In fact, I know I wouldn’t.

While I don’t consider my time reading it a waste, I would caution you before reading this one.

And that’s that.

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