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TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/all/20060325184608/http://www.whatbooks.com/2005/magical_thinking.php
The Year of Magical Thinking
by Authors:
Joan Didion
Hardcover
Average Customer Rating:
The Power of Intellect
Joan Didion's book is riveting and painful. She is a masterful craftsmen who does something that I have never seen before. She weaves together totaly different events, timelines and experience so that the story is seemless. She writes with such clarity that she captures events, moments, emotion, without making it emotional or manipulative. It is as if she is addressing you alone and you share in her moments.
She does not come across as likeable, but someone with a towering intellect and an extraordinary ability to pursue a goal of finding crucial answers while going through a shattering experience, beyond what almost anybody could endure. She is an amazing woman.
This book should inspire anyone who has ever had the need to rise above the unendurable, that they too can do what needs to be done to help someone else while experiencing great grief, and still survive.
The Year of Bad Writing
Boy, was I disappointed by this book.
Thankfully, it was a quick read.
Between reading about her lunches at Mortons, her frequent flights to Hawaii, the fact that in 1978 "no one thought twice about flying from SF to LA for dinner", I was incredibly turned off to Miss Didion as a writer and a person.
She might want to know that even in 1978 some people not only didn't think twice about flying commercially to catch dinner, plenty of people didn't even think once about it.
After finishing the book, I believe that her daughter Quintana was actually adopted, though that is only alluded to in one sentence.
Also, she never informs us about Quintana's death. Last we learn, she's in rehab in NY.
I happened to read Calvin Trillin's recent piece in the New Yorker about the loss of his wife, and was genuinely moved by his writing--as opposed to this often pompous memoir by Ms. Didion.
Her losses were indeed catastrophic. My heart goes out to her.
But this book is a failure.
She Needs to Wait and Try Again
Shallow. Phoney. Joan Didion is not "there yet". When she does face the enormity of the questions of life and death there will be much more to say. We all eventually have to deal with choosing either bitterness or depth from the experience of losing anyone close. I would not recommend this book.
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