We are not idealized wild things. 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.

The Year of Magical Thinking is Joan Didion’s attempt at making sense of the untimely loss of her husband John and the uncertainty of life of her daughter Quintana. What starts as an honest journey through grief, traverses deeper into Didion’s values of marriage, family, and the sanity of life.

Joan is known for her very detached writing prose, which is on full display again in The Year of Magical Thinking. While the book could have very easily been just about her feelings as a widow, she incorporates many academic journals and studies on loss to go hand in hand with her experience. While her insights are often beautiful, her writing style does make it appear that she is above emotion at multiple junctures.

The final third of the book, where everything falls into place for Didion, is the highlight of the book. She experiences a profound revelation about why she can’t seem to throw John’s shoes away. This moment serves as the pivotal point where she realizes that change is inevitable, and this is backed by the autopsy report, which demonstrates that nothing could have been done to extend his life even one more day.

There wasn’t much that was “magical” per se about this book from an outsider’s perspective, but by the end, I shifted my view, choosing to see it as a love letter rather than a continuing battle of grief.

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.

Overall Rating: 6/10