The Year of Magical Thinking
National Book Award Winner
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4.2 • 714 Ratings
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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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. The author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and 11 other works chronicles the year following the death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, from a massive heart attack on December 30, 2003, while the couple's only daughter, Quintana, lay unconscious in a nearby hospital suffering from pneumonia and septic shock. Dunne and Didion had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years, and Dunne's death propelled Didion into a state she calls "magical thinking." "We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss," she writes. "We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes." Didion's mourning follows a traditional arc she describes just how precisely it cleaves to the medical descriptions of grief but her elegant rendition of its stages leads to hard-won insight, particularly into the aftereffects of marriage. "Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age." In a sense, all of Didion's fiction, with its themes of loss and bereavement, served as preparation for the writing of this memoir, and there is occasionally a curious hint of repetition, despite the immediacy and intimacy of the subject matter. Still, this is an indispensable addition to Didion's body of work and a lyrical, disciplined entry in the annals of mourning literature.
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.