The Year of Magical Thinking
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Narrated by:
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Barbara Caruso
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By:
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Joan Didion
About this listen
National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2005
"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.The weeks and months that followed "cut loose any fixed idea I had about death, about illness, about probability and luck...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience. Her portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad, will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, a wife, or a child.
Listen to Joan Didion's full-hour interview with Charlie Rose.©2005 Joan Didion (P)2005 HighBridge CompanyListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
- 2005 Audie Award Nominee, Biography/Memoir
- National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee, Autobiography, 2005
"Many will greet this taut, clear-eyed memoir of grief as a long-awaited return to the terrain of Didion's venerated, increasingly rare personal essays....This is an indispensable addition to Didion's body of work and a lyrical, disciplined entry in the annals of mourning literature." (Publishers Weekly)
"The Year of Magical Thinking is not a downer. On the contrary. Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative." (The New York Times)
Featured Article: The top 100 memoirs of all time
All genres considered, the memoir is among the most difficult and complex for a writer to pull off. After all, giving voice to your own lived experience and recounting deeply painful or uncomfortable memories in a way that still engages and entertains is a remarkable feat. These autobiographies, often narrated by the authors themselves, shine with raw, unfiltered emotion sure to resonate with any listener. But don't just take our word for it—queue up any one of these listens, and you'll hear exactly what we mean.
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Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
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Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
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Forever Ours
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Story
Forensic pathologist Janis Amatuzio first began recording the stories told to her by patients, police officers, and other doctors because she felt that no one spoke for the dead. She believed the real experience of death, namely the spiritual and otherworldly experiences of those near death and their loved ones, was ignored by the medical professionals, who thought of death as simply the cessation of breath. She knew there was more.
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Forever Ours
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Story
When their only child was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at the age of two, Maryanne O'Hara and her husband were told that Caitlin could live a long life or be dead in a matter of months. Thirty-one years later, Caitlin lost her battle with this devastating disease following an excruciating two-year wait on the transplant list and a last-minute race to locate a pair of healthy lungs. The sudden spiral of events left Maryanne in an existential crisis, searching to find an answer to the eternal question: Why we are here?
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I don't know who needs to read it...
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The Trip to Echo Spring
- On Writers and Drinking
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- Narrated by: Kate Reading
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In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.
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Great Narration!!!!!! Great story about 20 Century make writer who suffer with alcoholism. If you like this topic and want more
- By Pamela Abbey on 04-25-21
By: Olivia Laing
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Truth Doesn't Have a Side
- My Alarming Discovery About the Danger of Contact Sports
- By: Dr. Bennet Omalu, Mark Tabb, Will Smith - foreword
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
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- Unabridged
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One day in 2002 the 50-year old body of former Pittsburgh Steeler and hall of famer Mike Webster was laid on a cold table in front of pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu. Webster's body looked to Omalu like the body of a much older man, and the circumstances of his behavior prior to his death were clouded in mystery. But when Omalu cut into Webster's brain, it appeared to be normal. Something didn't add up.
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Truly Enlightening
- By Marie on 01-31-20
By: Dr. Bennet Omalu, and others
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A Stitch of Time
- The Year a Brain Injury Changed My Language and Life
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- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
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Story
Lauren Marks was 27 when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain and left her fighting for her life. She woke up in a hospital soon after with serious deficiencies to her reading, speaking, and writing abilities, and an unfamiliar diagnosis: aphasia. This would be shocking news for anyone, but Lauren was a voracious reader, an actress, director, dramaturg, and pursuing her PhD. At any other period of her life, this diagnosis would have been a devastating blow. But she woke up...different.
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Absolutely wonderful book
- By SJMT on 01-27-19
By: Lauren Marks
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Nothing Was the Same
- A Memoir
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Story
Perhaps no one but Kay Redfield Jamison---who combines the acute perceptions of a psychologist with writerly elegance and passion---could bring such a delicate touch to the subject of losing a spouse to cancer. In spare and at times strikingly lyrical prose, Jamison looks back at her relationship with her husband, Richard Wyatt, a renowned scientist who battled severe dyslexia to become one of the foremost experts on schizophrenia.
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Liked the story better than the narrator
- By Pamela Harvey on 07-22-11
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The Last Love Song
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
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Messenger
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Oprah Winfrey has called him an inspiration, Maya Angelou saw him as a kindred spirit and fellow poet, and Jimmy Carter described Mattie Stepanek as the "most remarkable person I have ever known". When Jerry Lewis received his lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, footage of Mattie played behind him. Five years after his death from a rare neuromuscular disease, Mattie is still being celebrated for his indomitable spirit and message of hope.
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Loved Jeni telling Mattie’s story
- By Hello Mrs. on 12-29-22
By: Jeni Stepanek
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Mother Daughter Me
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a "year in Provence" with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoe, Katie's teenage daughter. Katie and Zoe had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a 77-year-old woman set in her ways....
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Listen and be swept away!
- By Barbara Quick on 06-02-22
By: Katie Hafner
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The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind
- My Tale of Madness and Recovery
- By: Barbara K. Lipska, Elaine McArdle - contributor
- Narrated by: Emma Powell
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 2015, Barbara Lipska - a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness - was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors had prescribed worked quickly. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity.
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Be Prepared To Feel Insane--
- By Gillian on 04-11-18
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Modern Loss
- Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it's clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let's face it: Most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We're awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit.
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Not What I Was Expecting
- By Bessie Mae on 03-01-23
By: Rebecca Soffer, and others
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What listeners say about The Year of Magical Thinking
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- M. Greene
- 08-27-06
once you've been there, you know
This book can be extremely comforting to anyone who lives through the death of a loved one. I can see from reading other reviews that some people don't get it; 3 years ago I wouldn't have either. When you're in "the twilight zone" of grief, you appear to be recovering from loss in a straight-forward, linear fashion--from the outside. Didion captures the jumbled emotions, guilt, irrational thought patterns, dreams, paralysis and flashbacks that she and others have lived through with the presence of mind of a gutsy, professional writer. Thanks, Joan, I'm not crazy after all.
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40 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Noreen
- 02-03-06
Magical Thinking
THis was the first audiobook I've ever listened to and it was an excellent introduction to the genre. The reader, Barbara Caruso, was wonderful. I listened while on jury duty and I'm sure the other members of the jury pool must have wondered why that woman sitting in the corner of the room was listening to her ipod and weeping.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Lylye
- 05-04-06
Excellent
Grief has never been so cutting, truthful and eloquent as this book shows. Ms. Didion's account of the year after her husband's sudden death is an elegant, sentimental journey that those shed to light all those feelings of despair, loneliness and emptiness that a death of a dear one cause on the living.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Cornelius Sheehan, LCSW
- 12-11-16
Overproduced: why the music?
I've seen the author interviewed a few times and I didn't feel like this was her voice, her presentation of her own work. I also didn't feel like spirit of a number of passages was captured. Finally, there is music fading in & out at chapter breaks. this was terribly distracting and the sound mix was bad so narrator was competing with music.
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- DTAR
- 03-30-23
Disappointing
I was informed this was the ultimate work on grief. The only thing it taught me was how different grief could be for individuals. Disappointing and unhelpful. If you are looking for a way to work through your grief, this is not the book you.
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- telson
- 12-22-18
Beautiful and heartbreaking
I recognized many of my own thoughts and feelings in this book, and it brought me both tears and comfort.
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- Barbara L Shumer
- 12-28-19
The Year of Magical Thinking
Beautifully written memoir of the year following her loving husband John’s unexpected death which was made all the more difficult as their only daughter was deathly ill and in the hospital. The audio is extremely well done.
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- Jennifer Y.
- 10-24-17
Highly recommend
I love the narrator of this book. The story of Joan and her husband, John and their life together was an amazing life. Her grief is understandable and we have a right to grieve our losses. She is a wonderful author. A must read for anyone who has lost a loved one.
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- Placeholder
- 05-10-13
Loving Joan Didion. A Year of Magical Thinking
This small book is magical. Anyone who has lost a family member will say "oh the same thing happened to me." Having lost too many people in my family I found this book at times funny, because I did the same thing, sad, not maudlin and educational. I have always liked Joan Didion's books but this one is my favorite. She recalls the small details one would experience after a death. She could not give his shoes away because he might come back and need them. That is a perfect example of magical thinking whether you are thinking like a sociologist or a psychologist or have lost a loved one.
Joan Didion's book Blue Nights is about the death of her daughter. I think of them as companion books but not alike. Read A Year of Magical Thinking. Sometimes it will make you smile.
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- Yvonne
- 06-15-16
I listen to this many times a year.
Narrator is perfect. The emotional level is always how I would imagine that the author intended. I listened to this many times before my own child was in a coma, and now I really relate to the year of magical thinking.
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