The Year of Magical Thinking Review

This book has taken me a long time to get through, not because it was a bad or poorly written book, but because it forced me to deal with the grief that I’d been burying for a long time.

Let’s go back in time for a minute. Right after Christmas, I was out shopping with one of my best friends when I felt . . . drawn to “The Year of Magical Thinking.” I can’t tell you exactly how I felt, but it was almost like something or someone was pushing me towards this book. After carrying it around the store for a little while, I decided to bite the bullet and buy it.

I’m a huge Carrie Fisher fan—she’s one of my biggest inspirations and one of my heroes. She came into some of my group chats on Twitter and talked to us, and she liked one of my tweets once. Other than that we never interacted, but I felt connected to her through our shared struggles with mental illness.

When she passed, I was shattered. I may have appeared to keep it together, but inside I was a mess—and I’m not even sure I was aware of how deep I was in grief. For a full year, I was grieving but I never started the mourning process.

Enter Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

Written in the year after Joan’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, passed away, it examines Joan’s grieving process and what was going through her head in the aftermath of losing her husband of 40 years while also dealing with her daughter’s illness. She’s somewhat linear when describing the timeline of the year with Quintana’s illness and John’s memorial, but it’s often scattered with memories and reflections—much like my own grieving process.

While reading this book, I often found myself agreeing with her observations on losing a loved one: reconstructing the moment of collision, hoping and planning for the loved one to somehow come back, not really anticipating the blow of the loss, thinking your crazy thoughts will only be isolated to the weeks after the death. In many ways, it felt like reading my own thoughts.

I could go on forever highlighting poignant passages, but there is one thing I wanted to address. Near the end, Joan talks about how she didn’t want that year to end because it took her further from John. Once the year anniversary passed, whatever had happened the year before no longer included her husband. He started becoming softer and more fuzzy in her mind—whatever she needed to deal with living life without him.

Yet she comes to the conclusion that we, the left-behind, must let the loved one go. Let them be the picture on the mantle or the memory. It’s not easy, and for a long time I didn’t really think it was necessary—then I looked at my weight gain and overall blanket of emptiness and realized that yes, it was necessary.

I can’t say that I’m completely letting go of Carrie, but Joan helped me start the process. And for that, I’m in her debt.

My Mother Was Nuts Review (Audiobook Version)

Before I get into my review for this book, I have to tell you why I love audiobooks.

Way before I got into journalism, I’ve always been a fan of people telling their own stories—you get to hear a really interesting perspective that you might not have considered otherwise. Audiobooks are a perfect form of that. My favourite kinds of audiobooks are memoirs/autobiographies read by the authors—reading them in print is one thing, but listening to fascinating people tell incredible stories breathes life into them in a way you otherwise wouldn’t experience.

So naturally, I loved Penny Marshall’s audiobook of “My Mother Was Nuts.”

You may know her as Garry Marshall’s sister or Laverne in “Laverne and Shirley,” but this book introduces you to Penny the person and makes you fall in love with her almost immediately.

Penny brings her trademark dry humour and wit as she reveals intimate details of her professional and personal lives—anyone who loves behind-the-scenes stories from their favourite movies and TV shows will enjoy all her anecdotes from “The Odd Couple,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Saturday Night Live,” “Big,” “A League Of Their Own,” and “The Preacher’s Wife.” Yet she can make you cry just as easily when she describes losing her mother, her abortion, and her lung cancer and brain tumour diagnosis.

A lot of famous faces make appearances in her memoir—particularly Garry and her “partner in crime” Carrie Fisher—but this is without a doubt her story, and she tells it beautifully. Her voice is unique, and no one’s lived a life quite like hers.

Near the end of the book, Penny talks about bucket lists and how she never had one—yet she managed to cross off everything she could have ever had on it. She’s a remarkable, accomplished woman who’s done everything anyone could hope to do and more.

She may have stumbled into fame, but she has most certainly earned her place among other Hollywood legends.