"The Year of Magical Thinking" Review

Universal feelings around grief

Grief is probably the hardest feeling to describe. Because it is not confined to just one definition. Grief looks and feels different for everybody. For Joan Didion, grieving the sudden death of her husband John Dunne, led her to imagine that maybe he will come back. Leading her to justify things like keeping his shoes in case her husband needs them. This is just one example of her unusual thinking following his death.

However, the more I read, the more I realized that her thinking was not unusual at all. It’s universal we just don’t talk about our grief often. Didion doesn’t try to define grief rather, she shows us what living with grief is like, based on her own experience which translates into an incredibly relatable one.

This is the second book I’ve read by Joan Didion. The first being “Where I was From.” For something with such grim subject matter, I expected myself to not enjoy it. But, the casual voice she conveys through her writing normalizes the dark subject. She did something that most people aren’t brave enough to reveal. She chronicled every thought, every feeling, and every movement she took while grieving. It is impossible to guess what a grieving person is going through just by looking at them. Didion showed us. Thus making us feel understood. And maybe a little less crazy.