Joan Didion Books

Beautifully written and wonderfully detailed, this book looks at literature by women who, in different ways, make "the West" their home. But Comer overturns defintions of the West as simply the old frontier and "the big sky." The West is black women in LA and Asian women in San Fransisco and Native Indian women writing about their modern lives. The book has very interesting interpretations of contempory women's literature, but the best part is the way it makes you re-think what you thought you knew about the "West." Put away your cowboy images, this book shows the West as a diverse region that has produced some of the best fiction writers in the nation.

A significant and important investigation of the problem of autobiography, place, and identity through the works of Gertrude Stein (the overlooked Everybody's Autobiography), Lillian Hellman (Scoundrel Time), Sam Shepard (Motel Chronicles), and Joan Didion. Reaves creatively and critically centers these writers around the problem of constructing an identity on an impossibly fractured and contradictory American grid. She devotes substantial and well-informed chapters on each author, and she successfully channels her discussion among the currents of autobiographical studies.

The study is refreshing because Reaves is not beholden to any single critical approach in her close and intelligent readings of the texts. To be sure, her work reflects a strong grounding in contemporary literary theory, but her writing is not bogged down by slavish thinking and overwrought jargon. The approach is accessible, perceptive, and rigorous. For anyone who's interested in any or all of these important American writers, and for anyone interested in deepening their appreciation for autobiography, I highly recommend this lively and bold book.

It would be false to say that I was ever truly familiar with the situation in El Salvador at any time, not truly, and what makes Didion's Salvador such an extraordinary essay is that it so thoroughly and eloquently elucidates a time and place, but does so with specifics that feel as endemic to any political crisis now, or any 100 years ago. In her first chapter, she describes her experience in El Salvador by saying "I came to understand, in a way I had not understood before, the exact mechanism of terror." Salvador is an extraordinarily precise evocation of El Salvador in 1982, of the failure of Reagan's policies there, but what makes it still relevant is exactly that evocation of mechanics, of the bodies at the morgue that add up but don't amount to a story, of the shudder of fear at the sight of headlights in a dark dining room, of the shifting game of verbiage that describes progress or failure or civil wars or assassinations. What I mean is that Salvador will move and feel familiar to anyone, and that, at the point she describes the particular failing of America that allows us to approach this conflict as "something of the familiar ineffable, as if it were taking place not in El Salvador but in a mirage of El Salvador," it will seem the most reasoned, obvious, and unsettling conclusion about national and international conflicts.

Everthing from the Patty Hearst case to uprisings in San Salvador to the Central Park Jogger case and political and international affairs through 2002 are covered in this spendid collection of essays. Didion's writing is some of the best I've seen (in essay form that is). She drives further and harder to the point of her message--supplementing it with quotes from a very extensive bibliography.

This is a case where, the longer the piece, the better, though all were very, very well written and formulated. I found her deptiction of Nancy Reagan in the "Fisher King" piece hilarious and her history of Central Park's construction/development very intriguing in "Sentimental Journeys."

This is truly a wonderful reader.

I study English in Denmark and we were told to read Play It As It Lays and that just made me hungry for more books from Didion and I was not disapointed. Her writing style is unique and the book is a classic a must-read when it comes to a description of contemporary American life.

I originally chose to read this book because it was written by Joan Didion. I found it was a mistake quite soon. At least for me. When I decided to read the book, I thought that it was one long piece. It is not. It is a series of essays on topics ranging from keeping a notebook ("On Keeping a Notebook") to the loose marriages in Las Vegas (Marrying Absurd). Some are as short as a couple pages some are closer to twenty, but most are in between.
I accredit Joan Didion as a wonderful writer and I believe that she deserves the praise she receives, but I was rather disappointed when I picked up this book, especially because I expected so much of her and this book. But each time she started a new section she failed to get me interested enough to want to continue reading. The essays don't have the benefit of being connected by a common theme or subject.
I was taught to write with metaphorical gold coins left along the path for the reader to find. Each coin could be a fun fact or anecdote that makes the reader want to learn more and perhaps find another. I never found Didion's gold coins. It possible, even likely, that they were there, but simply not shiny enough for me.
Another way I judge a good piece of writing is that I will notice how often I have until the end of the chapter. In a really good book, I never have to check because I am so lost in the story that a mundane thing like going to bed at a reasonable time, or in fact anything outside of what the author is telling me, ceases to matter. In this particular work, I found myself checking once every half of a page.
While Didion is a genius and other of books may hold my attention better, this is not what I consider to be her best series of work.

I had read Joan Didion's essays written in the sixties and covering a variety of topics when they were first published. I was pleased to see that this book was still available at a reasonable cost. Having just finished rereading it, I found that her views were insightful, honest and often humorous, and the one written about he 'flower children' in the Haight with the same title as the book was even prophetic. I was inspired to share it with my blog readers, most of whom were children in the sixties. Her comment that stands out "The center is not holding" aptly describes the restlessness of the time.

This book starts out citing W.B. Yeats and Peggy Lee, co-equals in esteem and regard. Yeats and his slouching towards Bethlehem, "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold...And What rough best, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" and this lovely gem from Miss Peggy, "I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Cary Grant." And what a unique dichotomy to start out a unique collection of essays uniquely told, from a voice risen above voices of that time--Joan Didion.

This book has a little story to it worth telling. I found myself in Boston of all places in the Harvard Book Store (no affiliation I guess to the better known little school near by). A bookstore staff member points out her recommendations from the staff recommendations section. It turns out she grew up in California parents of some freerer spirited, macrobiotic, driven by the very power of flowers types. This book store maven also goes to the little Harvard school and she recommends Joan Didion as one of her very fave reads of all fave reads. I having spent time in Cali myself and thinking that San Francisco is America's greatest city and having always been vexed, perplexed, and intrigued by that 60's counter-culture period in our country couldn't resist picking up the book...well picking it up from Amazon. Where else would one in their right mind buy books after all?

Joan Didion, as it turns out, is a phenomenal writer. She hails from Sacramento and wasn't in the thick of experiencing the 60's (aka Hunter Thompson) but a passionate 3rd person observer. She writes as if she is reporting on the age, place, and times but between the lines you pick up the pathos of these words, "Michael (a three-year old) burned his arm though, which is probably why Sue Ann was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electric cord. 'You'll fry like rice,' she screamed...they didn't notice Sue Ann screaming at Michael because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard damaged in the fire." And things fell apart.

But "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," isn't about the Haight-Ashbury district scene alone. Didion's writing extends to a love letter for John Wayne, personal reflections (which are far from self-absorbent as personal reflections can trend), and a witty eye that takes it all in unflinchingly, bracingly, and honest. Here's a little nugget from "On Self Respect," "...it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower."

I'll be a faithful reader of Didion for many moons to come. Thank you Harvard Book Store girl...thank you Amazon. Don't miss out on Didion dear readers. ...mmw

This is a great group of essays by one of the century's premier American essayists. I suppose reading her latest book, The Year of Magical Thinking, before reading her older material--which is what I did--necessarily changes one's perspective on her early essays. While I wouldn't recommend this approach, it certainly makes things interesting.

Anyway, this is an excellent collection of essays of various topics. If you're anything like me, it'll make you want to be a traveling journalist. If you're smart, it'll make you want to read the rest of her considerable repertoire. If you're human, it'll make you want to write.

4.5 stars
I read this when it first came out; it opened my 13-year old eyes to many things. One that has stayed with me is that Didion isn't constantly writing as a woman. She writes as a person and a thinker. She has a distinctly female viewpoint, but doesn't hit the reader over the head with it like a weapon. She lulls and then challenges you with her intelligence and perspective, and by the end you just naturally think, of course women are as smart as men. Maybe smarter.
My Dad loved Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and read every word they wrote as soon as it was published. I was damn lucky to grow up in a house full of great books by great thinkers.
This is a fine companion to Slouching Towards Bethlehem; if you don't know Didion's writing, it's time to get familiar with her. She's quality.

From 1966 to 1971 the author felt she had lost her script. It was hard to surprise her, hard to get her attention. At San Francisco State, in a campus uproar, the third president of the institution was referred to as Hitler Hayakawa. All narrative is sentimental. Connections are equally meaningful or senseless. Five years after James Albert Pike pronounced Grace Episcopal Cathedral finished, he left the Episcopal Church. He drove into the Jordanian wilderness with his new wife to experience Jesus's life and died. His wife lived.

The West starts where the average rainfall drops below twenty inches. The lack of water consumes consciousness. The state bought the Gallatin Mansion in 1908 for its governor. Under Reagan a new mansion was built. Jerry Brown refused to occupy it. The Getty stirs social discomfort. It embarasses people. It is old fashioned, didactic. It does not release the inner child in a museum-goer.

Joan Didion describes the experience of reading Doris Lessing as the hound of heaven commandeering the attic. Lessing is portrayed as a writer undergoing a profound and continuing cultural trauma. Georgia O'Keefe claimed attention for what she had done. At the Royal Hawaiian the essayist observes that great hotels have always been social ideas. The Royal Hawaiian opened fourteen years before the Pearl Harbor debacle. Women dressed in printed silks and lined cashmere cardigans inhabit the place. Joan Didion thinks of Honolulu as belonging to James Jones.

At Berkeley in the fifties, Didion's alma mater, no one was surprised by anything. The author feels she came into the world with a romantic ethic, believing that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments.

Didion's genius, in the book and a half of hers that I've read, is to waste not a single word on her evisceration of the culture she saw around her. But "evisceration" isn't the right word, and her essays thus far haven't really been about the culture around her. She sees a United States that is unintentionally ironic at every turn, and that has fallen apart in ways that ultimately crawl under all of our skins and drive us insane. The idealism of the Sixties turned into the madness of the late Sixties, and Didion was right there to watch the results unfold. She stands back and documents it with a few quick flicks of the paintbrush: just enough of an outline to make you understand the horror of what she sees, and then she moves on. The essays are structured, I think intentionally, with the quick cuts of modern movies. The images together don't make sense -- didn't in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and certainly don't in The White Album. The title essay in the latter is about a period in her life (probably right around the time she was writing Bethlehem) when the stories that we use to explain our world stopped making sense, and her life crumbled as a result. Her prose perfectly captures what I take to be the tone of her mind.

She's too smart to accept easy answers. Every time someone makes an argument -- even implicitly -- Didion is there with the knife to hack away the dross. I bet conversations with her are spectacular: challenging, thought-provoking, and energizing.

The praise gets heaped on Slouching Towards Bethlehem (as well it should), but after finishing The White Album, there is no doubt in my mind they are equals in every way - an eloquent, painstaking, timeless collection of one unexpected, evocative observation after another. The appeal of Didion's writing is often to glimpse the author underneath her thick and specific veils of details, to marvel at the way her specifics are often more telling about her than about what she's writing - her own sense of dislocation amidst the silly late-60's music industry, her heartbreak within a charred orchid greenhouse, her rather endless defensiveness of California in Hollywood board rooms and Beverly Hills restaurants. In that, my favorite piece in this flawless collection is the 3-page description of Georgia O'Keefe: "'The men' believed it impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O'Keefe painted New York. 'The men' didn't think much of her bright color, so she made it brighter. The men yearned toward Europe so she went to Texas." It's a proud and bold description of a proud and bold woman, but what it really is is a treatise on what it means to be inspired and emboldened by the work and life of someone who came before you. A similar piece could be written on the uncompromising career of Didion, and it could be written following any essay in The White Album.

Joan Didion always seems to look out at you from her book jackets in a straightforward, level-headed way, yet her readers will know she has a somewhat cockeyed view of life. Very Californian, as she quotes Bernard De Voto,"'The West begins, where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches." But hardly sunny, she's dark,dark: she has made the literature of nervous breakdown her own. We saw it in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "Play It As It Lays," and "A Book of Common Prayer;" also in "The White Album," essays first collected and published in 1979. She eyes the 1960s, and California, quite closely; she sketches the 1960's so well, in fact, she might almost have imaginatively invented them. It's all here, the Manson family, the Black Panthers, the historic doings at the University of California, Berkeley.

She says"...there were odd things going on around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable, but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of 'sin'-- this sense that it was possible to go 'too far,' and that many people were doing it-- was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9,1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski's house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised."

She continues," Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."

What an eye she has, what an ear, and what luck, too, right place at right time. And lucky us; she's given us so many reports from the front, wherever it may be, and continues to, still.

I may be too much of a lover of Didion's non-fiction works to take her fiction seriously. This being the third novel following detached and deluded female protagonists (after Run River and Play It As It Lays) into the extremes of their antipathy, it seems clear that, simply, her stories are too much work. A great Didion essay states its facts with such brutal lucidity, you barely notice the incisive, enraged, impassioned consciousness at their center. Her fiction makes you all too aware of the artifice behind the words, and though I believe A Book Of Common Prayer to be the best of the Didion novels I've read, I don't know that I fully bought the whole thing.

It begins strangely framed, like Didion's take on Cat's Cradle, an expatriate telling stories of other expatriates in Central America. Charlotte Douglass, the detached and deluded protagonist at its center, has details of great speculation - in the syntax of her storytelling and the odd personal attributes that get her, initially, under the investigation of a revolutionary government. But it's not until we visit her past in San Francisco, about her elusive daughter and two failed marriages, that the character really begins to come alive. Attached as Douglas's narrative is to the backdrop of a small revolutionary country, the story finds itself headed in an entirely different direction, quite successfully - it turns into Didion's That Obscure Object Of Desire rather than Didion's Cat's Cradle. There's a number of Didion's tendencies that still, I think, don't quite work in her fiction - her surprising leap into synopsis, her repetitive intrusion of key phrases, even her attempt to bookend the story in the same line seems a little (to be perfectly honest) stupid. But A Book of Common Prayer has undeniably more narrative verve than any of her previous fictional works - you may, in a sense, not enjoy watching a clueless protagonist amidst a quietly revolutionary backdrop, but you begin to need to see it play out.

This is a book that is hard to wrap your mind around. Didion does not tell you a clear story with well-defined characters and a plot-without-holes. Instead, the reader must do a little work here. It is what is not told in the story that is so fascinating. Didion appears to be making a comment on the impossibility of truly knowing other people's motivations, inner thoughts, and who they are at the core. All we can do as humans, and therefore in a sense informal anthropologists, is make assumptions from what we see, hear, and perceive. Sometimes we are correct; sometimes we are very wrong. But, that's okay. If you are the type of person who likes things neat and tidy, you will probably be disappointed. If you like books that make you draw your own conclusions, and perhaps feel ambivalent about most of the characters even to the end, then you will like this one. I tend to be the latter, so I did enjoy it.

This book has become one of my personal favorites. I found myself going back to the first chapter repeatedly to measure facts. A wonderful book to get lost in.

In this uncommonly excellent prose, Ms. Didion describes an incredible scenario of a revolution in a Caribbean country. The country is dirt poor. There is no good water, there are no proper sewers and there are few good roads, except the one highway that leads to the house of El Presidente.

The people live in squalor and there are only a few people in this island of the damned who are in fact solvent. The story tells of the tale of an American lady, norteamericana, who comes to the island, for reasons even she herself does not know. Her life has been tragic and strange. Her child becomes an American revolutionary and is involved in the hijacking of a plan from California to Utah. She lives an underground life and has no connection to her parents, whom she rejects socially and economically.

Didion's reporting style writing is almost a perfect match for telling the story of this obscure countries political corruption and the insurgency that exists within. She uses her incredible ability to turn a phrase and then to use it multiple times for an emphasis that is extraordinary in painting the picture of the world about her. Charlotte Douglas has come here to figure out something, but what it is hard to tell. She seems to be adrift in the impoverished lands of Boca Grande which translates to "Big Bay" or also as Didion points out to "Big Mouth."

Those in charge do have big mouths and talk out of both sides of it. There is constantly a strange dance performed by the few landowning ruling class that is constantly trying to shift the balance of power on the island to accommodate their own personal purposes. In the ensuing revolutionary action, Charlotte is actually killed. She could have easily avoided this fate by leaving the country, but instead, she insists on staying and ends up shot and left for dead on the lawn of the abandoned American Embassy.

The beauty of the story is in the writing more than the events. With pure journalist style mixed with incredible fictional reality, Didion creates what could be typical of the Central American/Caribbean countries and their constant revolutions. Many get caught up in them and never emerge. Charlotte is one who does not emerge.

As modern fiction, the book has a style that is unique to Didion. The smoothness of the writing and the deadpan descriptiveness is purely hers. It is the one book that she has written that is truly appropriate for all Americans to read. The book is highly recommended for those looking to see great fiction encompass the horror of revolution.

This book really didn't do anything for me. It is the story of a woman on a search for her child in an alien environment, where she amazes people by killing a running chicken by grabbing its neck, allowing herself to be seduced by an ex-husband, and finally putting herself in danger. While what is happening is under-stated, it adds up to a bunch of scenes that I just found confusing and not too interesting. Didion's writing style also didn't click for me, which is perhaps personal taste.

Not recommended.

I seldom read non-fiction, due to habit and training, mostly. However, when I read essays like these, I am as amazed and inspired as I would be by any great piece of fiction. Joan Didion's voice is clear, her eye sharp. This collection gathers essays from the 60's (a time I remember very well)up to and including the Bush Administration (a time I'd just as soon forget)and manages to combine history, social commentary and personality profiles into keen observations not only about the world at large, but also about herself as a part of that world. She moves from Las Vegas (I love her take on that place!) to California to Miami to El Salvador. All the while, as I read I stand in amazement at the way she writes. In his intro to the book, John Leonard says her "black album" is the "habitation of a brave heart and a radiant intellect, an ice palace and a greenhouse. . . to instruct us and the sentences we can almost sing." Certainly said better than I could have. If you can appreciate journalism as literature, you will no doubt enjoy these essays.

Tasteless, meaningless, insipid, Joan Didion is a writer for our times. Her cool detached nihilism dovetails perfectly with a world that abjures conviction and commitment. Even so, her work won't long outlast her life.

WARNING! This is an extremely biassed review!
No one writes like Joan Didion. Every story, almost every sentence is a study of someone who obviously loves the language.
Didion hones in on our finest feelings, our fears, our sorrows shot from her literary arrow, with the truest aim.
I cannot read Didion without wanting to know more...there is something in her non-fiction pieces which reaches out and grabs you, drawing you into facts that would send you to sleep if it were someone else offering them to you.
This is a fine collection of Didion observations. No one does it better. I am still resonanting to Self Esteem from Slouching Toward Bethlehem and I read it 10 years ago. Where I Was From is full of California stories, and even if you've never even visited the place you would know it intimately when you finish the book.
A great collection.

What I had read from Didion in my college comp. class could not have prepared me for the depth and beauty of her body of work. In retrospect, I cannot believe that my professor only asked us to read ONE essay from this remarkable woman. Her work is amazing! Now I see what thousands of others have always known--that Didion is undoubtedly one of the best essayists and authors alive today. I can't wait to read The Year of Magical Thinking next.

I checked this out from our local library the other day and it turned out to be a serendipitous find. I've read some of Didion's work previously of which _The Year of the Magical Thinking_ was the most recent.

This compilation was actually fun to read. My favourite pieces were the ones that focused on California or Southern California, respectively. She is a gifted storyteller.

I couldn't help but feel a keen sense of sadness for her with the noted timeline of her life (and historical moments, too). She lost both her parents, then her spouse and two years later her daughter.

I would suggest this book to others. It's a real treasure.

It's interesting to read Joan Didion in some sort of rough chronological sequence, because I'm watching her mind and her writing develop as I go. Her earlier books, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, are intensely personal affairs that use her own experiences to illustrate general features of 1960's America. They are brilliant pieces of work that have encouraged me to read everything else she's written, but they are also profoundly self-absorbed. Reading her earliest works, I feel like a therapist talking to someone who is stuck inside her own head; every time she tries to solve a problem, she finds some reason why she can't, and the chain of reasons ultimately leads in a circle back to her initial desperation. It's a good thing Prozac didn't exist then (only gin and hot water, and Dexedrine), or else we'd never have gotten works of such political and literary brilliance.

What's fascinating about those earlier books, and about After Henry (the most recent book of hers that I've read), is that there's at least one strong narrative line through all of them: they are books about the stories in which Americans enshroud the news. The White Album's title essay is famous for its opening line: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." That's what appears in Bartlett's from The White Album, but it's basically vacuous without the rest of the paragraph -- a paragraph that summarizes, at an abstract level, every essay that she's written since (at least among the ones I've read):

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

"Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. ..."

The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem continue on this theme, at very concrete levels. Didion is our Virgil, giving us the slideshow tour of Hell and only rarely drawing out a lesson. The world doesn't make sense anymore; the center isn't holding, and the best she can do is to paint small pictures for us of what she sees. She'll let us make up our own stories.

After Henry comes 20 years later, and you can tell what the time has done. The essays are tighter, more didactic, less personal, less self-absorbed: her examples come from the newspaper, and are quite explicitly about the lessons we can draw. Only now she's drawing lessons about the media itself: here is the Central Park Jogger case, which the media rapidly distort from one woman's sufferings into some allegory about the city itself. The allegories try to paint New York as itself raped, itself violated, itself likely to rise from the ashes. The story is no longer about this woman. It is about a city, but a city that has never existed; the story ignores pervasive racial and class differences in New York, all in a very predictable (and probably unconscious) defense of the ruling power structure. The story can never make New York corrupt and frightening; it is only allowed to make the city courageous and "bustling."

When Didion wrote that essay ("Sentimental Journeys"), New York was on the decline and crime was rampant. Yet the stories the media produced bore no relation to the frightening empirical reality that New Yorkers (apparently) saw. Nor did the stories around the 1988 presidential campaign bear any relation to what Americans knew about their country, or how the political process actually worked.

A map of how stories form, fold in on themselves, and ultimately serve the needs of the ruling class, is what Didion brings to the table. Reading her is like taking a deep, relaxing breath after reading the minutiae of, say, the Plamegate scandal; her stories about media distortion have been true as long as she's been writing, and remain true up to today.

Joan Didion is one of America's most gifted writers, and "After Henry" is no exception. Though at times her prose is lax, it is mostly pure and simple. "After Henry" is the perfect book of thoughts, essays for a rainy, Sunday afternoon. It is one of Didion's most heartfelt triumphs. Good

The Year of Magical Thinking possesses hauntingly concise prose. It is a one-woman show that reads like having a conversation with Didion. The telling is intimate enough to make it feel as if it is an older and wiser sister telling you what you may likely confront in your lifetime. It is detailed enough to make tangible for theatergoers in New York City and Los Angeles face what one wishes was unimaginable. It is phenomenal enough to show why Didion is one of the best writers of our times and that there is seemingly nothing that she fails to find the words for.

That there will be a moment in time when you feel unquestionably safe--and the moment following, one of the most important people in your life may pass on. She tells the reader about how she handled the passing of her husband as a journey--from being the cool, methodical thinker, as his passage from this life was confirmed, to being unable to give away his shoes because he would need them when he came back, to being able to come to terms with his absence.

Her daughter fell ill before her husband passed. While her daughter is in the hospital in California, Joan Didion faces more than treading on doctors' toes and doing everything possible to pull her daughter through the illness. She also faces streets full of memories ready to take her away into magical thinking. In order to keep away from the memories, she takes well-planned routes from her hotel room to her daughter's hospital room. Didion tells the story of seeing her daughter come out of illness, and then being unable to protect her from falling ill again, and her passage from this life.

The play is not filled with an overwhelming sense of hope, but hope still finds a home in the play. While reading it I couldn't help but think of those I know who have passed on and how I would handle it if my own husband and daughter were to pass out of this life before me. I imagined the unbearable grief as I read. By the end of the play I could feel how to make it through, to survive something that one would rather not.

Armchair Interviews says: It is that quiet, affirming hope that Didion's play possesses.

The Year of Magical Thinking a Play by Joan Didion is based on her memoir. This play gives you a voyeuristic journey inside a woman's grief. Ms. Didion, a noted author and playwright lost her husband in 2003. Within a short period of time, less than two years later, she would also lose her daughter. That kind of loss is unimaginable to most people. We all have experiences with losing loved-ones, but rarely two in such a short span of time. Ms. Didion's prose is written quite sparely and almost from a distance but it is no less wrenching. She appears to view her pain from a distance while feeling the full impact of it.

The play starts out with this passage; This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That's what I am here to tell you. I felt those words down in my very being. Though the words were simple, they were poignant, heartfelt and oh so true. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one will feel the impact of her prose.

After her husband John Dunne passes, Joan appears to be in a state of suspended expectation. The most difficult thing for her to accept is that he is not coming home. In fact for many weeks she expects him to return. It's sad to read how hard it is to accept her lost.

Shortly thereafter when her daughter becomes ill, she has something else to be concerned with. She immerses herself in research about her daughter's illness to try to fill the void in her life. It is wrenching yet dispassionate in so many ways reading about her daughter's illness and ultimate demise. Ms. Didion has exposed her love and pain in an amazing way.

In sixty-two pages this play takes us through a roller coaster of feelings. What impacted me so was how the words were never overwrought, but so strongly felt. I loved the way she evaluated the relationship she had with both her husband and her daughter. The simple what-if-onlys. The Year of Magical Thinking allowed me to realize there is no set way to grieve and that we all react differently. I recommend this play and the aforementioned memoir to Joan Didion fans and to anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one.
Angelia Menchan
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