FIVE STARS

I’d never heard of Joan Didion until I started researching essayists, after having read the Autobiography of Mark Twain.

I purchased two of her tomes, The White Album, and The Year of Magical Thinking, having no intention of reading the latter due to the subject matter of grief. But I wanted it to be a part of my library because I liked the title. Sometimes a book picks you because it just knows …...

The day I received this book, I slowly skimmed the pages, and found that I couldn’t put it down. This was not an easy book to read, but it was right. It knew. Turns out, Magical Thinking has not let go of me since I read it. Within Didion’s exceptional way of navigating through the mystical side of words, I found myself attempting to bear out, what certainly is the in-depth mourning of the ones that are left behind.

There are some critics who define this book as nothing more than pretentious drivel; that the only reason it was published at all was the fact that Didion was already an acclaimed writer. I think these reviews must certainly have come from people who completely missed the point of the book.

As Didion writes,

 "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it."

In 2003, John Dunne and Joan Didion were sitting down to dinner, talking. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t talking anymore. Just like that. A massive coronary. In the blink. Married 40 years, both were writers. A commonality that filled their lives with wonderful sounds. In 2004, magical thinking began taking the place of those sounds, and Joan Didion - as she was known, was no more.

This book is a tour de force journey through the life of one person as her thoughts are transformed by grief; a distraction of life in the details of death; and most assuredly, the shallowness of sanity. A master writer. A ride you will not soon forget.

John and Joan
2002

Tragic coda:

On August 26, 2005, eighteen months after the death of John Dunne, and one month before the book was to be published, Quintana Roo Dunne, the only child of John Dunne and Joan Didion, died from acute pancreatitis at the age of 39.

When asked by her publisher if she wanted to change the manuscript to reflect her daughter’s death? “It’s finished.” was all she said.

Didion and Quintana at John's funeral
2003

Quintana's ashes are alongside her father at St. John the Divine in New York.

Ms. Didion continues to write.

Joan Didion has finished work on a new memoir about aging, Blue Nights.
It will be published by Knopf in 2011.

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