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Up the Creek Book Club


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The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

June 2006

Synopsis

The Year of Magical Thinking"Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack. This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." With vulnerability and passion, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss. THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife, or child."

(Publisher)

Winner of the 2005 National Book Award for Non-Fiction

Reviews

  • "The Year of Magical Thinking, though it spares nothing in describing Didion's confusion, grief and derangement, is a work of surpassing clarity and honesty. It may not provide "meaning" to her husband's death or her daughter's illness, but it describes their effects on her with unsparing candor. It was not written as a self-help handbook for the bereaved but as a journey into a place that none of us can fully imagine until we have been there." (The Washington Post)

  • "Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative…As in Didion's previous writing, her sense of timing, sentence by sentence and in the arrangement of scenes, draws the reader forward. Her manner is deadpan funny, slicing away banality with an air that is ruthless yet meticulous." (New York Times Book Review)

Book Club Rating and Comments

We loved this book. Very sensitively written. We thought it would be depressing, but it wasn't at all. A must read. If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.

Other Books by Joan Didion

  • A Book of Common Prayer
  • After Henry
  • Democracy
  • Last Thing He Wanted
  • Miami
  • Play It As It Lays
  • Political Fictions
  • Run River
  • Salvador
  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem
  • Where I Was From
  • White Album