The Year of Magical Thinking

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

4.5/5⭐

This memoir follows the author–Joan Didion– in the year after the sudden death of her husband and the life-threatening illness of her daughter.

The way Didion writes is sometimes blunt, sometimes painfully detailed, but always incredibly honest.

She walks the reader through her experience with grief and mourning–two words that, she illustrates to us, have vastly different meanings.

She describes her inability to accept that John–her husband–is never coming back. That she didn’t need to keep a pair of his shoes around the house. That she couldn’t wait for him to edit her writing, because that moment would never come.

In a thousand small ways she paints a picture of grief–the break from reality, the denial, the confusion, the pain, the anger, the self-pity, the progress, the set-backs, and most of all the gaping absence that fills each day.

She wonders what John would think of a given topic–big or small–and faces the fact that she will never know. She can never ask.

And now she begins to wonder how much she truly knew the man she had spent the bulk of her life with, and fears it is less than she assumed.

When the time to ask has run out, the unanswered questions pile up.

As the year ends, Joan clings to memories that are already fading. She faces the new year with a pit in her stomach that tells her that John can no longer be the center of her life.

To start a new life, to take even one more step, she has to, finally, let him die.

Quotes:

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”