The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion

Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking.

Joan Didion’s work always leaves me spellbound and speechless and The Year of Magical Thinking was no exception. Didion’s ability to manipulate her reader’s emotion through her command of the language is awe inspiring—it is a talent I would strive to emulate. In this text I cried, I laughed, I grieved and I took steps towards recovery with Didion.

At first her distance from the events unfolding is somewhat off-putting. But how else to write about it? One can not examine their emotions with any sort of objectivity without stepping back and looking at actions and reactions; reporting. Didion’s ability to report her pain is almost mind-boggling. She walks her reader through her tragedies (compounded) with the tone and perspective of a journalist.

And then it hits you. This is her life, her heart.

The reader must step back and consider what discipline it took to create such a text. The Year of Magical Thinking does not have the sharp-edged prose of Didion’s other non-fiction works, but then how could it? It is sharp on subtler levels. In this text she is reporting the death of a dentist in California and the subsequent events.

No. She is reporting the death of her life partner – and the subsequent events as they unfolded in her soul. She is reporting the near-death of her only child—while she is in the throes of her grief. And we cry, struggle and survive with her. Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking has outdone herself. She has given the reader a piece, not of literary genius, but rather a profoundly intimate part of herself.