The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion’s heartbreaking, uplifting memoir of loss is even more affecting in audio
It seems impossible to imagine that Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking could be any more heartbreaking a tale, but the audio version of this tragic story renders it even more affecting. Audio book narration legend Barbara Caruso’s crisp, intelligent voice glides seamlessly into the pools of warmth and sadness that permeate this elegiac memoir of Didion’s life in the year following the death of her husband, author John Gregory Dunne.

An instant classic — it won the National Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiograpy — The Year of Magical Thinking begins with the death in their home of Dunne and the hospitalization of their daughter, Quintana. “You sit down to dinner, and life as you know it ends,” writes Didion. From there, Didion invites us to share her journey of denial, hope, regret, and magical thinking, all sharply articulated in an elliptical fashion.

As she relives her life with her husband as well as the moment of his passing through a kaleidoscope of perspectives partnered with exhilarating prose, the reader experiences her pain. Didion struggles with whether to keep his shoes, how to contend with his autopsy results, and how to maintain maximum strength as her daughter’s physical state worsens.

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

And when she finally, almost triumphantly, allows herself to let go and move forward ever so gently, the reader feels as if they, too, have arrived at a safe harbor. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” she says.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a moving document of a deeply moving moment in time from one of America’s most treasured essayists. Somehow — magically, perhaps — Didion has transformed her sadness into an uplifting experience.