Year Of Magical Thinking: Play Analysis

I went into reading The Year of Magical Thinking having the play to compare it to. After reading the play I had fallen in love with Didion’s impeccable writing style, and I wanted to see it developed in a full length book. I was expecting something very similar to the play that I had read, but that is not what I received. Having the light of a book to express her thoughts in gives Didion the ability to express far more than she could in a play, and over the course of the book she has less to cover. In this book, unlike the play, her daughter has not yet passed away, and that is a crucial piece of information. The book is full of love for her husband, and she creates a character for him that, as a reader, I felt I was going to miss despite that face that he was dead from the very beginning of the memoir. Through her memories of him, she made me get to know him and care for him, and she got me invested in their relationship, but his death made it so that I knew it was over. In a strange way, I felt myself wanting him to come back, but I knew this is impossible due to the fact that it was a

She talks about how self pity is a natural part of the human experience of grieving, and she convinces the reader of this too. She shows the reader that this is how she copes. As a reader, or at least for me, I understand and appreciate this. This book is kind of a downer, and it can be rather technical at times, but it remains a page turner because of the great flow and smooth stories. Also, the technicality of this piece rings true to the person that you learn Didion is. In her memoire she writes “Information is control”, which is a direct example of the ways in which Didion copes. She copes by learning everything that she can about the subject in order to limit surprises, and then she achieves the control that someone like her