The Year of Magical Thinking

The Play

Paperback, 62 pages

English language

Published May 15, 2007 by Vintage.

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (34 reviews)

"this happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you . . ."In this dramatic adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir (which Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times called "an indelible portrait of loss and grief . . . a haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage), Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play.The first theatrical production of The Year of Magical Thinking opened at the Booth Theatre on March 29, 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare.From the Trade Paperback edition.

12 editions

Review of 'The Year of Magical Thinking' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I never liked the term Magical Thinking. To me it's a term people use to characterize the way others think--others not rational like themselves. Not long ago, I read Thinking Fast and Slow. (The Insert book/author feature isn't working today). The author, Daniel Kahneman, takes pains to indicate the types and occasion in which people think less than rationally. He didn't include grief among those occasions. I always took irrationality as the norm--the first draft of thinking edited later to clean it up.

Joan Didion finds her self thinking her dead husband will return but she knows he won't. Her internal magician isn't fooling her. She knows it's just a game she's playing with herself because she wishes he could return. The suddenness of his death in an "ordinary instant" disrupts the natural editing process and she becomes aware of this aspect of her thought process. It's temporary. A year …

Review of 'The Year of Magical Thinking' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

By an unnatural coincidence, during the week that I started reading this book my brother collapsed, and was subsequently diagnosed with terminal cancer. I finished the book, in between tending to him, but must admit to a certain level of distraction. And I took it very personally.

So I'm afraid that this is going to be a very self-indulgent review, wallowing in self-pity, as it were.

First off, Joan Didion wrote this book as a form of therapy. This is something that I's going to have to try. Actually, I suppose that that's what I'm doing right now. (By another coincidence, when reading to Karl from the Scientific American that had just shown up in his mailbox, I came across an article on the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, theorizing that this is part of what's caused the recent explosion of blogging.)

Didion found solace in poetry - …

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