The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion 2005

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
grief loss love literary fiction

Our Take

Didion applies her surgical prose to her own grief, and it is devastating precisely because she does not perform devastation. She catalogues. She cross-references. She thinks through the year after her husband's death with ferocious control, and the grief seeps through every crack. Don't read this if you love someone.

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