Critical Articles: Annotated Bibliography for The Year of Magical Thinking

CPT Critical Articles: Annotated Bibliography for The Year of Magical Thinking

Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
             Print. Gideon, Lewis-Kraus. "'The Year of Magical Thinking' by Joan Didion."
             Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 03 Oct. 2005. Web. 03 Apr. 2016.

The Year of Magical Thinking is poignant, and also poignantly beautiful, a memoir written during a year after her husband's death. She describes her magical thinking directly like she cannot give her husband's shoes away because he may need them when he comes back. Didion is careful to use language to preserve order and continuity. Because she wrote this book to express her feelings honestly, she easily got out of grief. However, her loss was too painful. Throughout Didion's book, we understand about magical thinking itself, and this book resonates with us.

Gideon compares The Year of Magical Thinking with Didion's other works and her writing styles, Gideon noted: "Her pieces examined how lives do and do not withstand such disintegration" (1). Then, Gideon reviews the book, mentions and describes well the main topic, magical thinking, and uses other sources to describe Didion's grief. This article is reliable and objective, because it is about the story and learning of Didion's book and her writing style through all of her works. Gideon's review helps us to look deep inside her grief and magical thinking, and also her feelings when she wrote this book.

This article is helpful for me, because it is not just about the book itself, it also includes her writing style and the setting when she wrote this book. Because this article is objective, I focused and looked deep inside of Didion's magical thinking and her grief. Throughout this article, I found how she withstand her grief and how her writing styles make us to be more touched. It did not change my think about the topic, magical thinking. It makes me more sure about it, because it is not biased.

1.       "'The Year of Magical Thinking' is an aching -- and achingly beautiful -- chronicle of this year of fragments shored against Didion's ruins" (Gideon 1).

2.       "It is thus a difficult, moving and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward" (2).

3.       "We are left with the impression that her near-pathological honesty will in time allow her to cope -- without magic -- with things falling apart" (2).

McCrum, Robert. "The 100 Best Nonfiction Books: No 2 – The Year of Magical Thinking
             by Joan Didion (2005)." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 08 Feb. 2016.
             Web. 03 Apr. 2016.

Joan Didion talking about her experience of her husband's death in The Year of Magical Thinking. She wrote this book to deal with her grief of losing her husband. Six years later, she wrote the book, Blue Night, again about the loss of her daughter, Quintana. These two books, especially The Year of Magical Thinking made her famous. This book is about Didion's magical thinking like its title, and it is shown that she cannot give away her husband's stuffs. At first, she looks okay since she already had an experience with this kind of grief, but she comes face to face with an abyss of grief, and it is shown that she wanted her husband back. Didion transformed grief into the book.

McCrum focuses on the review of The Year of Magical Thinking and the transformation from grief to literature, helped me to look inside more about the book and her grief. Because this article is more about the book itself and her related works about grief, it leads me to concentrate on the book, and her grief. Because this article used many quotes and is written with the explanations about the quotes, it is reliable, and objective. This article gives me the information not only about The Year of Magical Thinking, but also her other books related with her grief.

This article helps me to know about the book itself and her other works about her grief, also her emotional changes, reminded me about her experiences and gave me focus. So this article describes well Didion's emotional changes after the loss of her husband, supports the idea of magical thinking, also grief. It is more focused on Didion's grief than her magical thinking, let me realize that the grief itself also can be a main topic.

1.       "Didion’s memoir helps to purge her grief and to set her loss in the new context of widowhood" (McCrum).

2.       "(S)he cannot give away her husband's shoes, because, she thought, he would need them when he returned" (McCrum).

3.       "Then, via her own 'apprehension of death' (that offstage nemesis) and her quotidian fears for her own resilience ('I began feeling fragile, unstable… What if I fell?'), she comes face to face with an abyss of grief. It’s one of her finest prose passages" (McCrum).

Vanier, Jean. "From Exclusion to Inclusion: A Path of Healing." Becoming Human.
             Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2008. 69-103. Print. CBC Massey
             Lectures Ser.