RaveSlateThe Year of Magical Thinking is raw, brutal, compact, precise, immediate, literate, and, given the subject matter, astonishingly readable. But the implicit claim to cultural significance is harder to assess ...her daughter, Quintana Michael, lay comatose in a hospital bed, Didion watched her husband, John Gregory Dunne, die of a heart attack ... Few of us can say how we would fare with a child in intensive care and a spouse fresh in the grave. On the other hand, the function of Didion's book is precisely to tell us what we might expect ...the emptiness of depression, the superstition of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the agoraphobia of anxiety states, and the terror of post-traumatic stress disorder. Didion reports these experiences, along with some of grief's differentiating traits ...Didion's techniques diverge subtly from Styron's. When Didion quotes poets, she intends to clarify her own grief ... Paradoxically, an account of grief that aimed for universality would overflow with memories of the person lost ... Perhaps we are witnessing a special sort of grief, grief in a woman whose longstanding defenses have been overwhelmed.
