Joan Didion's "Year of Magical Thinking"

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]I read this book because a friend of mine told me after my my dog died that I needed to read this. And then I read it again when my dad got pretty far with his Alzheimer's. And I've been searching for so many different types of books about the end of life, and I feel like this one really spoke to me because it's not prescriptive. It's not these beautiful lessons of what to do or how to feel. It's really just her bearing her soul in these beautiful anecdotal stories that are juxtaposed to her emotions.

[00:00:30]>> Definitely cosign on any Joan Didion recommendation. This is actually Joan Didion's table. She might have written a chunk of A Year of Magical Thinking at this table. It is a beautiful book, one of the most moving books on grief and loss that you will ever read. There's a reason it won a National Book Award, and it is the kind of book that people give to someone whether their parents are dying or whether their dog is dying.

[00:00:55]Nobody knows what to say when somebody is going through something like that.

[00:00:58]And sometimes a book can be the perfect thing to hand them. One of my favorite lines in A Year of Magical Thinking is towards the beginning, they're kind of just going through something with their daughter, and her husband's struggling with a bunch of stuff. He thinks, "I I don't think I can deal with this. I don't think I can I can do this." And Joan Didion just looks at him and says, "You don't have a choice. Like, you don't get a vote." Life puts us in these situations, and we have to figure out how to respond. And And this is her wrestling with that. I think Didion, sort of a lower-case stoic, just captures the mercilessness of that, but also the fortitude and resilience of the human spirit within it.