The Year of Magical Thinking

5 hrs. 39 min.

Language Russian

Author Joan Didion

Narrator Evgenia Merkulova

Description

An honest and brilliantly written book about what lengths our brains will go to in order not to let go of the people we love. And about the fact that sooner or later we still will have to do it. In the life of the well-known writer Joan Didion, tragedy entered on December 30, 2003. That’s when, right during an ordinary family dinner, her husband John Gregory Dunne—the famous writer, too—died of a massive heart attack. That was the start of the hardest and strangest year of her life. Her mind, to the very end, refused to believe in the loss of a loved person: it searched for patterns and symbols in the past, interpreted every breath of wind as an unseen presence, and convinced Didion that her husband would surely return. The main thing is to believe—because strong belief, multiplied by symbolic actions, can work a real miracle. In psychiatry, this state is called “magical thinking.” Primarily, it is characteristic of children who are sure that a strong desire can change reality as we would like it to. And besides children, those who are experiencing a serious psychological trauma also resort to “magical thinking.” And Didion describes in meticulous detail how it happens and what it leads to.