The Year of Magical Thinking
National Book Award Winner
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4.2 • 769 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A landmark work about grief, love, and survival from one of America’s most iconic writers
One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Joan Didion delivers a searing portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost a husband or wife or child. In a work of electric honesty and passion, Didion explores how we all, somehow, will ourselves to survive. “An utterly shattering portrait of loss and grief.” –The New York Times
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana Roo, fall ill with septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later, the Dunnes were sitting down to dinner after visiting their daughter in the hospital when John suffered a fatal heart attack. In that one moment, their partnership of forty years came to an end.
This powerful narrative is Didion's “attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”
“Didion has transformed grief into literature.” —The Guardian
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This may be one of the most emotionally honest, clear-eyed examinations of grief that you’ll ever read. One evening in December 2003, as their daughter, Quintana, was in intensive care fighting pneumonia and sepsis, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had just sat down to dinner when he suffered a massive heart attack. The Year of Magical Thinking details how Didion weathered the loss of her husband and creative partner of four decades while still caring for their seriously ill daughter. It’s almost like she’s returning to her days as a reporter, only this time her subject is how grief constantly reappears in her everyday life—like when she finds herself unable to throw out his shoes (he’ll need them when he comes back). She details it all in prose that’s somehow both detached and achingly emotional. While it’s not always an easy read, The Year of Magical Thinking is cathartic and intensely powerful.
Customer Reviews
Slow Start but eventually couldn’t put it down!
This evoked several emotions and widen my perspectives. Meaningful read.
Detached.
The first 21 chapters felt like being stuck on the phone with someone I couldn’t quite bring myself to care about. And then in chapter 22 I finally did.
nothing is more permanent than death
and that's okay to talk about. to acknowledge. the fear, the anger, the love, the lost love, the pain, the hope - this book has brought me closer to the light than anything else has in the last 35 days since my mom had to leave.
truly grateful for joan's words.