Customer Reviews

The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play

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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
[...]

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.

My review is actually based on seeing the play recently here in DC. I found it interesting that one can receive either the play or the book with such dramatically divergent reactions. I would say my theater-going experience was quite in line with several of the negative comments about the book--

Sorry, but all I could think after seeing it was that every event in our lives isn't necessarily worthy of being turned into a play. There was no substantial message here and little entertainment value. The two plot lines - her husband's death and daughter's illness left you feeling that not enough time was devoted to either- just making the play seem flat or empty.

I'm sorry for her loss, but watching her go on and on about it was painful. It was more of a recitative of the agonizing details of the death and the days that followed. There was no breakthrough moment, no ups and downs to her monologue- just the same thing- did she ever get over it? At times it didn't seem as if she even really liked her husband. She expressed typical motherly sentiments about the daughter, but you weren't really convinced. It was as if there was more to their relationship than she was telling you, and that, whatever it was, it wasn't pleasant. My mother died in February, and I thought this play might have been in some way meaningful to me. It just wasn't...

I have read most of Didion's books and so bought this at a used bookstore without knowing what it was about. Like many of the reviewers before me, the first few chapters describing her husband's death kept me reading, but by the middle of the book I found it a chore to pick up. The content became very repetitive and, as I moved through the pages, utterly hopeless in its tone. Having experienced grief myself and knowing the grasping for some truth that would tell me 'hold on, you will get through this,' I found no such message here and would not recommend this book to anyone grieving the loss of a loved one.

The other issue Didion dealt with at the same time as John's death was their daughter's mysterious illness. Unfortunately this issue gets lost in Didion's grief and there is no real outcome provided in the book. We know that Quintana got out of the hospital but nothing beyond that. The topic is simply dropped with no real emotion expressed by the author.

I feel that for a piece to be worthy of public consumption there ought to be something of value that readers can walk away with. Perhaps as a study of grief, Didion's book could rightfully find its way onto a handful of bookshelves, but as a general reader it is sorely lacking the author's trademark writing charm and expertise. In fact, it is poorly written. There is nothing magical here, except that someone gave the book a wonderful title that belies the meaning the author intended, that she suffered through a year of denial and as of the last page had not recovered from it. Now, almost 4 years after her husband's death, I hope Ms. Didion has found some of the peace she was obviously lacking when she wrote this book.