Hello and welcome to the debut Slate Audio Book Club. I'm the program's producer Andy Bowers,

inviting you to open up your copy of The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and settle in for a lively discussion.

We take you now to the Housing Works Used Book Cafe in New York, where your host Megan O O'Rourke, has assembled our book club's charter members.

I'm Megan O'Rourke. I'm Slate's culture editor, and I want to welcome you to Slate's first podcast book club.

I'm sitting here at the Housing Works Used Bookstore and Cafe in Soho in New York City.

Along with me are Katie Roofy, a Slate contributor and the author of many

books, including Still She Haunts Me, and Stephen Metcalf, Slate's book critic. And the book we're

discussing today is Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. So let's start with our initial

reactions because I know we actually had some real diversity of opinion here. Katie,

what did you think? I think that with a few slight reservations, it's really quite an amazing

document about grief. And I don't think, I think it's a very original subject since C.S. Lewis,

I don't think anyone's written a great book on this subject. And I think the subject particularly lends itself to Didion's style. And Steve, what about you? I think with some minor

reservations, I completely disagree with Katie. And I found the book, while I sympathize completely

with Didion's situation, which is impossible not to sympathize with, I found the book almost completely unmoving.

And except for certain pruriance as we look in, we get this window into this extremely glamorous sort of bi-coastal literary and Hollywood couple. Other than that, I found the book

almost completely uninteresting. Wow. And now I'm imagining that most of our listeners have read

the book, but for those who haven't or for those who read it some time back, let me just kind

of re-sum up what the book is about. It's the year of magical thinking. It chronicles a year in Joan

Didion's life that begins shortly before, I think, her 40th wedding anniversary with her husband,

John Gregory Dunn. They had come back from the hospital where their daughter, Cantana Rue,

lay in a coma, and Dunn suffered, I think, a massive cardiac arrest and

died pretty much instantaneously. So what the book chronicles is the year afterward, where

...