the year of magical thinking book review

My sister gave me a copy of Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking,' and the late author's memoir greatly changed my perspective

When you buy through our links, Business Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

• The book I gift the most is " The Year of Magical Thinking " by Joan Didion.
• Didion, who died on December 23 , wrote her 2005 memoir after her husband, John Dunne, passed away.
• It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

The gift I've given the most over the years is, perhaps surprisingly, a book about loss. 

Joan Didion, who passed away on December 23, 2021 , wrote her award-winning, unforgettable 2005 memoir, " The Year of Magical Thinking ," after her husband of 40 years, fellow writer John Dunne, died suddenly one night at home. 

"Life changes fast…" Didion writes, "You sit down to dinner, and life as you know it ends." 

Didion details her year thereafter, weaving in memories of their partnership along with medical research to make sense of her grief. The result is a spellbinding, exquisitely humane book reported from the eye of a storm. In her own words, Didion's writing is an "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."

Joan Didion writes about the year after she lost her husband, John Dunne, as she recollects their exceptional life together.

I initially received "The Year of Magical Thinking" as a present, and it's one of the only gifts I still remember who gave to me (my sister) and for what occasion (my 22nd birthday). After reading it more than five years ago, it's still my all-time favorite book — and one I've given to friends, family members, and my partner. 

Why "The Year of Magical Thinking" is the book I gift the most:

Every person can find something to relate to, whether they've lost someone or not..

In a testimonial for the book, Mary Ann Gwinn of the Seattle Times wrote , "Everyone who has ever lost anyone, or will ever lose anyone, would do well to read [' The Year of Magical Thinking ']." Despite how much time and money we spend trying to avoid it, death is an inevitable part of life. All of us will eventually lose someone — each of us is the target demographic for this book. In that sense, it's a good gift for pretty much anyone who may appreciate it.

Whenever someone expresses surprise that I've given " The Year of Magical Thinking " as a gift, I believe it's because our culture treats aging and death as taboos. But I don't see them as impolite or incongruous with celebration, and I don't think you don't need to wait for an arbitrarily "appropriate" situation in order to give someone a once-in-a-lifetime read. A great book is its own occasion.

Didion's honest writing can spark deep conversations with loved ones.

One of the things that makes this book so universal is Didion's concise and exact writing style — you won't find overly sentimental musings. Instead, she pens a love letter from a wild and lonely frontier, transporting us into the exceptional life she shared with Dunne, who she lived and worked alongside for 40 years. 

Even the title hints at radical honesty being a throughline of the book: The "magical thinking" of loss. For example, Didion is reluctant to give away Dunne's shoes after his death because if he comes back, he will need them. She also describes editing things he'd written, laboring over the decision of whether to move a comma and change the meaning of a sentence or not. 

The truthfulness with which Didion discusses some of life's most essential elements — death, love, memory, marriage, creative work — spurred deep conversations with my loved ones after they read it, bringing us closer together.

The overarching message — that death and grief are bound up in love and memory — inspires reflection on what matters most in life. 

Joan didion (r) with her daughter quintana roo dunne (l) and husband john dunne in malibu, california, 1976. john bryson / contributor / getty images.

While death and loss are painful, they're also inextricably linked with the most enjoyable and profound parts of being alive. Engaging with grief, particularly from Didion's perspective, is to also engage with the preciousness of the people we are lucky enough to love.  

While "The Year of Magical Thinking" is an incredible roadmap for surviving loss, it also helped me learn what kind of life I'd like to build — and intensified my appreciation for the people I love the most. 

John Leonard of The New York Times Review of Books wrote: "I can't imagine dying without this book." Neither could I. And that's the best kind of reading experience I could give to my loved ones.

• Main content

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

Awards & Accolades

National Book Award Winner

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

National Book Critics Circle Finalist

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

by Joan Didion ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 2005

A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...

A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.

In late December 2003, Didion ( Where I Was From , 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

Share your opinion of this book

More by Joan Didion

BOOK REVIEW

by Joan Didion

More About This Book

IN THE NEWS

PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

More by Jon Krakauer

by Jon Krakauer

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ By Joan Didion: Book Review

Updated 09/16/2022

Published 08/28/2020

Rev. Nancy Niero

Ordained Clergywoman, Hospice Chaplain, and Former Hospital Chaplain

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

Joan Didion begins her 2006 memoir about her husband’s death at the dinner table from a massive heart attack, with “life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” 

Jump ahead to these sections:

What is the  year of magical thinking about.

• The Universal Language of Grief in The  Year of Magical Thinking

In the ensuing chapters, the reader discovers not only the details of John Gregory Dunne’s death, but the intimate details of their life together and especially the way they worked together as well-known writers.

Didion’s memoir tackles all the mundane details that tend to affect those who are in the midst of real grief and loss. She captures what life is without him, and brings the reader on the journey with her. It’s as if we are all together traveling with Didion as she returns back to the night of Dunne’s death with questions about her memories.

The details that she describes of preparing dinner, making a fire in the fireplace, what they were eating when he stopped talking, and how he slumped makes the reader feel like they are at the dinner table too, watching the surreal events of someone who is taking their last breaths.

The reader begins to get the picture of the pain as Didion sets the exposition in the first chapter. Her husband dies the same evening after visiting their recently married daughter, Quintana, in the Intensive Care Unit at a local New York City hospital. We begin to see that so many of those discerning decisions after a death must wait for a daughter to be told her father has died. (note: Quintana Roo Dunne died almost a year later, on August 26, 2005 and Didion wrote a memoir of her death, Blue Nights in 2011.)

Finding comfort from literary greats about grief

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be,” Didion writes. Anyone who has experienced the sudden death of a loved one understands the depth of her words, and her grief. She seeks support in literature she loves, including C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed , the journal he wrote after the death of his wife. She wraps herself up with poetry from W.H. Auden and continues her daily walks in Central Park. Her friends and family are nearby, but it is her reading about death and dying that the reader begins to understand her desire to unravel the mystery as to what happened that night at the dinner table. 

For anyone who has had a loved one die suddenly, there are questions with few answers. Didion explores all of the questions and struggles to find the answers, which is altogether what her “waves” of grief are in the days, weeks, and months that follow Dunne’s death.

She turns to Emily Post’s 1922 book of etiquette, where under “funerals” she discovers the details of etiquette with the recently bereaved, funerals, and food. And while reading about food at funerals etiquette may not be my way of grieving, it is hers, and the reader can see all the ways grief looks different in us all. In that grief, she tries to reconstruct the hours prior to Dunne’s death, the days before he slumps at the dinner table, as if to remember every detail as they are the most important of their lives together.  

“I said I would build a fire, we could eat in. I have no memory of what we meant to eat. I do remember throwing out whatever was on the plates and in the kitchen when I came home from New York Hospital. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,” she writes, and then adds, “I spent a great deal of time trying first to keep track of, and when that failed, to reconstruct, the exact sequence of events that preceded and follows what happened that night.” 

And she does, and we travel with her through those details of daily living. It’s as if she cannot bear to miss any of the last few hours of their life together, and then her life alone without him. Those last details of their life together seem to consume her, but anyone who grieves the sudden death of someone they love knows this desire to remember everything in that first raw, tender, angry wave of grief.

The Universal Language of Grief in The   Year of Magical Thinking

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness,” she writes months after Dunne’s death. 

We don’t have to have had the death of a spouse or a partner to understand the sorrow she feels. She uses the words common to the universal language of grief that everyone who grieves has found themselves with. However with the death of a spouse, describing this acute loss even with the words associated with grief can become extremely painful. On the night that John died, they were 31 days shy of their 40 th wedding anniversary and their only child was in an ICU struggling for her life. 

Didion’s grief swells with the eventual hospital discharge of Quintana, the funeral, and Quintana’s trip back to the hospital on another coast, with a potential life-ending fall that results in a hematoma. The slow recovery of Quintana’s hospital stay in Los Angeles, is another huge wave in Didion’s grief of her husband.

Didion weaves a year of grief in this memoir with the details of death and dying, grief and loss that makes this a beacon of light for readers who struggle with how to not just move forward, but just simply how to move.

Capturing the nuances of grief, and what we expect to feel

We read of how difficult it is, impossible for her to get rid of Dunne’s shoes, as if he will need them again when he returns. As readers travel with her at the end of this year, she writes, “grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it[…]

We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

The Year of Magical Thinking is a Unique Comfort for the Bereaved

As someone who has had both her parents die suddenly in accidents, I found Didion’s journey of grief a comfort to read. A sudden unexpected death of someone beloved is an entirely different journey of grief than someone who doesn’t die unexpectedly. 

Didion takes the reader on a journey filled with the details of a great love, and her struggle to hold onto all of the details, and memory, and remembrances, and the fear of forgetting one detail on all the different waves of grief. It is what makes this a great read for those whose hearts have broken from loving someone who dies, and how someone went about healing those broken places. 

Didion’s book is a memoir for our time. Read it if you have had someone beloved die. It really will help your journey by bearing witness to hers.

If you're looking for more recommendations, read our recommendations for life-changing books and books you must read before you die .

You may also like

'A Beginner's Guide to the End': A Book Review

Why Do Humans Have to Die? The Circle of Life

What Happens if a Powerful or Controversial Figure Dies?

Beyond the 5 Stages: New Models of Grief

• Bookreporter
• ReadingGroupGuides
• AuthorsOnTheWeb

The Book Report Network

Sign up for our newsletters!

Regular Features

Author spotlights, "bookreporter talks to" videos & podcasts, "bookaccino live: a lively talk about books", favorite monthly lists & picks, seasonal features, book festivals, sports features, bookshelves.

• Coming Soon

Newsletters

• Weekly Update
• On Sale This Week
• Summer Reading
• Spring Preview
• Winter Reading
• Holiday Cheer
• Fall Preview

Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the year of magical thinking.

In our quest to live life to the fullest, most of us have only a vague idea of what will happen to us when the people we love, the people closest to us, die. Sure, we know that death is inevitable for us all somewhere far off in our wished-for future. So we draw up wills and provide for the "rainy day." And we expect that there will be a process called "grieving." But as my own late mother used to say, repeating the Irish wisdom, "We'll deal with it when we have to."

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING by Joan Didion is her memoir of what she went through in dealing with the unthinkable. On December 30, 2003, Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, returned home from the hospital where their only daughter, Quintana Roo, lay in a coma, suffering from severe pneumonia and septic shock. While sitting down to dinner, Dunne had a massive fatal heart attack. They were 31 days shy of their 40th wedding anniversary.

Didion begins this book with the simplest of words: "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity."

Quintana would spend 24 days in intensive care after her father's death. Two months later, she collapsed and was rushed into surgery after developing a life-threatening hematoma on her brain. (Sadly, Quintana passed away from an abdominal infection in August. Asked by the New York Times if she would change the manuscript to include her daughter's death, Didion replied, "It's finished.")

Two such catastrophic events happening almost simultaneously would be enough to test the endurance of anyone. And, indeed, Didion writes that this period "cut loose any fixed idea that I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

Writers write. It is the way we decode and make sense of that which often does not make sense. Didion explains, "In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control."

She discovered that the literature on grief, going back to Freud in 1917, is relatively sparse for such a universal ordeal. When told at the hospital that her husband was dead, a social worker described her reaction as being that of a "cool customer," as if that was somehow reassuring. Didion writes, "I wondered what an uncool customer would be allowed to do. Break down? Require sedation? Scream?"

What followed for her was a year of magical thinking, an attempt to change the narrative by an act of will. She couldn't throw out John's shoes simply because he would need them when he came back. "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it," 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."

Memory turned into a "vortex" that could suddenly sweep her away. And here we find Didion's powerful descriptive writing and superb eye for detail. She drives past an LA movie theater and suddenly it was 1967, and she and John are at the premiere for The Graduate . Or she recalls buying her "short white silk" wedding dress in San Francisco at the exact same time that JFK was being assassinated in Dallas.

Didion, author of five novels and seven works of nonfiction, is one of America's greatest writers and essayists. Her two collections of essays about the 1960s, SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM and THE WHITE ALBUM, are essential reading for anybody who wants to understand how America came apart during that turbulent decade. They also should be read by anyone interested in good writing and journalism. Didion is a true master of the craft.

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING is Didion at her best, covering her most painful story. And she answers "the question of self-pity" by not engaging it. It is impossible not to feel overwhelming sadness after losing the person you loved and spent virtually everyday with for 40 years. But she brings to her loss her journalistic honesty and the ability to search for and find the deeper truth, no matter how unsatisfying that truth may be.

And in so doing, she not only manages to liberate herself from her year of magical thinking but also to provide something of a guide for the rest of us as well. In addition to being a wonderful memoir, this book is an invaluable meditation for that time when the far-off future suddenly becomes now and the rainy day turns into a deluge.

Reviewed by Tom Callahan on January 24, 2011

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

• Publication Date: October 4, 2005
• Genres: Nonfiction
• Hardcover: 227 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• ISBN-10: 140004314X
• ISBN-13: 9781400043149

The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner › Customer reviews

Customer reviews.

The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Top positive review

Top critical review

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

From the united states, there was a problem loading comments right now. please try again later..

• ← Previous page
• Next page →

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

July 24, 2024

• NK Jemisin on the power of speculative fiction to deconstruct colonial power
• Revisiting Robert Plunket’s Love Junkie
• Murat Özyaşar on why he doesn't write in his native language

JOAN DIDION

The year of magical thinking.

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

October 4, 2005

Publication Date: 

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

ABOUT THE BOOK

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book 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.

Purchase the Book

Her book is thrilling…a living, sharp, memorable book…an exact, candid, and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement…sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth..

—Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review (cover)

Read an Excerpt

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Notes on change.doc”) reads “May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.,” but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.

For a long time I wrote nothing else.

The ordinary instant.

At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, “the ordinary instant.” I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word “ordinary,” because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. “He was on his way home from work—happy, successful, healthy—and then, gone,” I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who had been living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an “ordinary Sunday morning” it had been. “It was just an ordinary beautiful September day,” people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.”

“And then—gone.” In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside. Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks, all those friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates on the dining room table for however many people were around at lunch or dinner time, all those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher and filled our (I could not yet think my) otherwise empty house even after I had gone into the bedroom (our bedroom, the one in which there still lay on a sofa a faded terrycloth XL robe bought in the 1970s at Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills) and shut the door. Those moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I remember most clearly about the first days and weeks. I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them. At one point I considered the possibility that they had picked up the details of the story from one another, but immediately rejected it: the story they had was in each instance too accurate to have been passed from hand to hand. It had come from me.

Another reason I knew that the story had come from me was that no version I heard included the details I could not yet face, for example the blood on the living room floor that stayed there until José came in the next morning and cleaned it up.José. Who was part of our household. Who was supposed to be flying to Las Vegas later that day, December 31, but never went. José was crying that morning as he cleaned up the blood. When I first told him what had happened he had not understood. Clearly I was not the ideal teller of this story, something about my version had been at once too offhand and too elliptical, something in my tone had failed to convey the central fact in the situation (I would encounter the same failure later when I had to tell Quintana), but by the time José saw the blood he understood.

I had picked up the abandoned syringes and ECG electrodes before he came in that morning but I could not face the blood.

In outline.

It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.

Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center’s Singer Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004) more commonly known as “Beth Israel North” or “the old Doctors’ Hospital,” where what had seemed a case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

December 30, 2003, a Tuesday.

We had seen Quintana in the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North.

We had come home.

We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in.

I said I would build a fire, we could eat in.

I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink.

I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he was reading in the chair by the fire where he habitually sat.

The book he was reading was by David Fromkin, a bound galley of Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914 ?

I finished getting dinner, I set the table in the living room where, when we were home alone, we could eat within sight of the fire. I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us. I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building fires. We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lit the candles. John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sat down. My attention was on mixing the salad.

John was talking, then he wasn’t.

At one point in the seconds or minute before he stopped talking he had asked me if I had used single-malt Scotch for his second drink. I had said no, I used the same Scotch I had used for his first drink. “Good,” he had said. “I don’t know why but I don’t think you should mix them.” At another point in those seconds or that minute he had been talking about why World War One was the critical event from which the entire rest of the twentieth century flowed.

I have no idea which subject we were on, the Scotch or World War One, at the instant he stopped talking.

I only remember looking up. His left hand was raised and he was slumped motionless. At first I thought he was making a failed joke, an attempt to make the difficulty of the day seem manageable.

I remember saying Don’t do that.

When he did not respond my first thought was that he had started to eat and choked. I remember trying to lift him far enough from the back of the chair to give him the Heimlich. I remember the sense of his weight as he fell forward, first against the table, then to the floor. In the kitchen by the telephone I had taped a card with the New York–Presbyterian ambulance numbers. I had not taped the numbers by the telephone because I anticipated a moment like this. I had taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance.

Someone else.

I called one of the numbers. A dispatcher asked if he was breathing. I said Just come. When the paramedics came I tried to tell them what had happened but before I could finish they had transformed the part of the living room where John lay into an emergency department. One of them (there were three, maybe four, even an hour later I could not have said) was talking to the hospital about the electrocardiogram they seemed already to be transmitting. Another was opening the first or second of what would be many syringes for injection. (Epinephrine? Lidocaine? Procainamide? The names came to mind but I had no idea from where.) I remember saying that he might have choked. This was dismissed with a finger swipe: the airway was clear. They seemed now to be using defibrillating paddles, an attempt to restore a rhythm. They got something that could have been a normal heartbeat (or I thought they did, we had all been silent, there was a sharp jump), then lost it, and started again.

“He’s still fibbing,” I remember the one on the telephone saying.“V-fibbing,” John’s cardiologist said the next morning when he called from Nantucket. “They would have said ‘V-fibbing.’ V for ventricular.”

Maybe they said “V-fibbing” and maybe they did not. Atrial fibrillation did not immediately or necessarily cause cardiac arrest. Ventricular did. Maybe ventricular was the given.

I remember trying to straighten out in my mind what would happen next. Since there was an ambulance crew in the living room, the next logical step would be going to the hospital. It occurred to me that the crew could decide very suddenly to go to the hospital and I would not be ready. I would not have in hand what I needed to take. I would waste time, get left behind. I found my handbag and a set of keys and a summary John’s doctor had made of his medical history. When I got back to the living room the paramedics were watching the computer monitor they had set up on the floor. I could not see the monitor so I watched their faces. I remember one glancing at the others. When the decision was made to move it happened very fast. I followed them to the elevator and asked if I could go with them. They said they were taking the gurney down first, I could go in the second ambulance. One of them waited with me for the elevator to come back up. By the time he and I got into the second ambulance the ambulance carrying the gurney was pulling away from the front of the building. The distance from our building to the part of New York–Presbyterian that used to be New York Hospital is six crosstown blocks. I have no memory of sirens. I have no memory of traffic. When we arrived at the emergency entrance to the hospital the gurney was already disappearing into the building. A man was waiting in the driveway. Everyone else in sight was wearing scrubs. He was not. “Is this the wife,” he said to the driver, then turned to me. “I’m your social worker,” he said, and I guess that is when I must have known.

I opened the door and I seen the man in the dress greens and I knew. I immediately knew.” This was what the mother of a nineteen-year-old killed by a bomb in Kirkuk said on an HBO documentary quoted by Bob Herbert in The New York Times on the morning of November 12, 2004. “But I thought that if, as long as I didn’t let him in, he couldn’t tell me. And then it—none of that would’ve happened. So he kept saying, ‘Ma’am, I need to come in.’ And I kept telling him, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t come in.’ ”When I read this at breakfast almost eleven months after the night with the ambulance and the social worker I recognized the thinking as my own.

Inside the emergency room I could see the gurney being pushed into a cubicle, propelled by more people in scrubs. Someone told me to wait in the reception area. I did. There was a line for admittance paperwork. Waiting in the line seemed the constructive thing to do. Waiting in the line said that there was still time to deal with this, I had copies of the insurance cards in my handbag, this was not a hospital I had ever negotiated—New York Hospital was the Cornell part of New York–Presbyterian, the part I knew was the Columbia part, Columbia-Presbyterian, at 168th and Broadway, twenty minutes away at best, too far in this kind of emergency—but I could make this unfamiliar hospital work, I could be useful, I could arrange the transfer to Columbia-Presbyterian once he was stabilized. I was fixed on the details of this imminent transfer to Columbia (he would need a bed with telemetry, eventually I could also get Quintana transferred to Columbia, the night she was admitted to Beth Israel North I had written on a card the beeper numbers of several Columbia doctors, one or another of them could make all this happen) when the social worker reappeared and guided me from the paperwork line into an empty room off the reception area. “You can wait here,” he said. I waited. The room was cold, or I was. I wondered how much time had passed between the time I called the ambulance and the arrival of the paramedics. It had seemed no time at all (a mote in the eye of God was the phrase that came to me in the room off the reception area) but it must have been at the minimum several minutes.

Excerpted from The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Copyright © 2005 by Joan Didion. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

   BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR  

  joan didion books  .

• NONFICTION BOOKS
• BEST NONFICTION 2023
• BEST NONFICTION 2024
• Historical Biographies
• The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
• Philosophical Biographies
• World War 2
• World History
• American History
• British History
• Chinese History
• Russian History
• Ancient History (up to 500)
• Medieval History (500-1400)
• Military History
• Art History
• Travel Books
• Ancient Philosophy
• Contemporary Philosophy
• Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Great Philosophers
• Social & Political Philosophy
• Classical Studies
• New Science Books
• Maths & Statistics
• Popular Science
• Physics Books
• Climate Change Books
• How to Write
• English Grammar & Usage
• Books for Learning Languages
• Linguistics
• Political Ideologies
• Foreign Policy & International Relations
• American Politics
• British Politics
• Religious History Books
• Mental Health
• Neuroscience
• Child Psychology
• Film & Cinema
• Opera & Classical Music
• Behavioural Economics
• Development Economics
• Economic History
• Financial Crisis
• World Economies
• Investing Books
• Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
• Data Science Books
• Sex & Sexuality
• Death & Dying
• Food & Cooking
• Sports, Games & Hobbies
• FICTION BOOKS
• BEST NOVELS 2024
• BEST FICTION 2023
• New Literary Fiction
• World Literature
• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• Classic English Literature
• American Literature
• Comics & Graphic Novels
• Fairy Tales & Mythology
• Historical Fiction
• Crime Novels
• Science Fiction
• Short Stories
• South Africa
• United States
• Arctic & Antarctica
• Afghanistan
• Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
• Netherlands
• Kids Recommend Books for Kids
• High School Teachers Recommendations
• Prizewinning Kids' Books
• Popular Series Books for Kids
• BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
• Ages Baby-2
• Books for Teens and Young Adults
• THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
• BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2023
• BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2023
• Best Audiobooks for Kids
• Environment
• Best Books for Teens of 2023
• Best Kids' Books of 2023
• Political Novels
• New History Books
• New Historical Fiction
• New Biography
• New Memoirs
• New World Literature
• New Economics Books
• New Climate Books
• New Math Books
• New Philosophy Books
• New Psychology Books
• New Physics Books
• THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
• Actors Read Great Books
• Books Narrated by Their Authors
• Best Audiobook Thrillers
• Best History Audiobooks
• Nobel Literature Prize
• Booker Prize (fiction)
• Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
• Financial Times (nonfiction)
• Wolfson Prize (history)
• Royal Society (science)
• Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
• Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
• Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
• The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
• Audie Awards (audiobooks)

Book Reviews on...

The year of magical thinking, by joan didion.

This book is also chosen for the cheat factor: it has an amazing bibliography at the back. She mentions Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking  (2005), which is amazing.

The best books on Grief recommended by Sophie Ratcliffe

Other books by Joan Didion

South and west: from a notebook by joan didion, play it as it lays by joan didion, slouching towards bethlehem by joan didion, the white album by joan didion, political fictions by joan didion, our most recommended books, war and peace by leo tolstoy, on liberty by john stuart mill, middlemarch by george eliot, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, republic by plato, the confessions by augustine (translated by maria boulding).

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce, please support us by donating a small amount .

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

© Five Books 2024

The Book Report Network

• Bookreporter
• ReadingGroupGuides
• AuthorsOnTheWeb

Sign up for our newsletters!

Find a Guide

For book groups, what's your book group reading this month, favorite monthly lists & picks, most requested guides of 2023, when no discussion guide available, starting a reading group, running a book group, choosing what to read, tips for book clubs, books about reading groups, coming soon, new in paperback, write to us, frequently asked questions.

• Request a Guide

Advertise with Us

Add your guide, you are here:, the year of magical thinking, reading group guide.

• Discussion Questions

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

• Publication Date: October 4, 2005
• Genres: Nonfiction
• Hardcover: 227 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• ISBN-10: 140004314X
• ISBN-13: 9781400043149
• About the Book
• Reading Guide (PDF)
• Critical Praise

• How to Add a Guide
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Newsletters

Copyright © 2024 The Book Report, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Critic’s Pick

Review: ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ Gets Joan Didion’s Intention Just Right

A play based on the writer’s memoir about the death of her husband, in its first New York revival, goes small to powerful effect.

By Laura Collins-Hughes

The timeline of loss was mercilessly fast. On Dec. 30, 2003, Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died mid-conversation at the dinner table in their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In late August 2005, their grown-up only child, Quintana, died, less suddenly.

Even mid-devastation, Didion did what writers do: observe and chronicle. First came her crystalline memoir of grief for Dunne, “ The Year of Magical Thinking ,” a best seller when it was published in October 2005, only weeks after their long-ailing daughter’s death. “ Blue Nights ,” Didion’s memoir of mourning Quintana, was that book’s counterpart, released in 2011.

In between, with a rapidity that’s startling, Didion’s stage adaptation of “The Year of Magical Thinking” arrived on Broadway, in March 2007. A monologue directed by David Hare and produced by Scott Rudin, among others, it starred Vanessa Redgrave as Didion. This was a prestige cultural event: tasteful, literary, remote. Presumably, remote was not the goal.

The scale of it was all out of whack — not the script, which Didion imbued with a soul-baring directness, but the production. The memoir’s starkly personal story, so intimate as a reading experience, was told now before a crowd of hundreds. We, the audience, were asked to accept one famous artist — the sturdy, statuesque Redgrave — as the stand-in for a highly recognizable other, the diminutive Didion, who was in her early 70s then, with a fragility about her. It was all too large. It did not capture the essence of the book.

How thrilling, then, that the first New York revival of “The Year of Magical Thinking” does. Directed by Jonathan Silverstein, this Keen Company production goes small, and in doing so, gets the play sublimely right.

Rejecting the distancing formality of a traditional theater setting, it is being performed around the city in living rooms and community spaces whose seating capacity ranges from 12 to 35. Its star is the esteemed Off Broadway actor Kathleen Chalfant, in what may be her best-matched role since Vivian Bearing in “ Wit ,” more than 20 years ago.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

• Member Login
• Library Patron Login
• Get a Free Issue of our Ezine! Claim

Reading guide for The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the Book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

The Year of Magical Thinking

• Critics' Opinion:
• Readers' Opinion:
• First Published:
• Oct 4, 2005
• Write a Review
• Buy This Book

About this Book

• Reading Guide

Reading Guide Questions

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Consider the four sentences in italics that begin chapter one. What did you think when you read them for the first time? What do you think now?
• In particular, address “The question of self-pity.” Does Didion pity herself? In what ways does she indulge that impulse, and in what ways does she deny it?
• Read the Judges’ Citation for the National Book Award, above. Why do you suppose they deemed the book a masterpiece of investigative journalism?
• Discuss the notion of “magical thinking.” Have you ever experienced anything like this, after a loss or some other life-changing occurrence? How did it help, or hinder, your healing?
• Do you think Didion’s “year of magical thinking” ended after one year, or did it likely continue?
• Consider the tone Didion uses throughout the book, one of relatively cool detachment. Clearly she is in mourning, and yet her anguish is quite muted. How did this detached tone affect your reading experience?
• How does Didion use humor? To express her grief, to deflect it, or for another purpose entirely?
• Over the course of the book, Didion excerpts a variety of poems. Which resonated for you most deeply, and why?
• To Didion, there is a clear distinction between grief and mourning. What differences do you see between the two?
• One word critics have used again and again in describing this book is “exhilarating.” Did you find it to be so? Why, or why not?
• Discuss Didion’s repetition of sentences like “For once in your life just let it go”; “We call it the widowmaker”; “I tell you that I shall not live two days”; and “Life changes in the instant.” What purpose does the repetition serve? How did your understanding of her grief change each time you reread one of these sentences?
• The lifestyle described in this book is quite different from the way most people live, with glamorous friends, expensive homes, and trips to Hawaii, Paris, South America, etc., and yet none of that spared Didion from experiencing profound grief. Did her seemingly privileged life color your feelings about the book at all? Did that change after reading it?
• At several points in the book Didion describes her need for knowledge, whether it’s from reading medical journals or grilling the doctors at her daughter’s bedside. How do you think this helped her to cope?
• Reread the “gilded-boy story” on pages 105–6. How would you answer the questions it raised for Didion?
• Is there a turning point in this book? If so, where would you place it and why?
• The last sentence of the book is “No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.” What does this mean?
• Didion is adapting The Year of Magical Thinking into a play bound for Broadway. How do you imagine its transition from page to stage? Would you want to see the play?
• Before The Year of Magical Thinking , had you ever read any of Joan Didion’s work? Do you see any similar themes or motifs?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Vintage. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.

• "Beyond the Book" articles
• Free books to read and review (US only)
• Find books by time period, setting & theme
• Read-alike suggestions by book and author
• Book club discussions
• and much more!
• Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
• More about membership!

Book Awards

• Media Reviews
• Reader Reviews

Beyond the Book

• Read-Alikes
• Genres & Themes

Become a Member

BookBrowse Book Club

Members Recommend

The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl by Bart Yates

A saga spanning 12 significant days across nearly 100 years in the life of a single man.

Solve this clue:

L T C O of the B

and be entered to win..

Win This Book

Smothermoss by Alisa Alering

A haunting, imaginative, and twisting tale of two sisters and the menacing, unexplained forces that threaten them and their rural mountain community.

Your guide to exceptional           books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

Free Weekly Newsletters

Discover what's happening in the world of books: reviews, previews, interviews, giveaways, and more plus when you subscribe, we'll send you a free issue of our member's only ezine..

Spam Free : Your email is never shared with anyone; opt out any time.

The Literary Edit

Review: The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion

I thought starting my thirty-second year on the planet reading The Year of Magical Thinking would be rather apt. I had bought a copy while on a book splurge at Bondi based bookstore Gertrude & Alice , and so, before my birthday festivities began, I spent a slow morning in bed, with a lit candle, the fan on full blast; the leaves of my bedside plant swaying in the breeze.

I first came across The Year of Magical Thinking when I was living in Los Angeles last year with my boyfriend; I very nearly bought it at the Barnes and Noble I used to frequent in Studio City, but we were nearing the end of our time in the states, and I still had a towering pile of books to get through before boarding a flight back to London. And so it was when I saw it while browsing for books in Bondi recently, I quickly added it to my growing pile of tomes.

I’m not sure what it was that I expected from reading it; perhaps some inspiration on how to live a magical year; perhaps a motivational manual that would kick start my thirty-second year in the best way possible.

Alas, neither were true of The Year of Magical Thinking. The memoir is a melancholy one; an observation of grief, Didion talks openly about the sudden death of her husband, which coincided with her only daughter falling ill, and both the heartache and mundanities that followed.

We learn about life before and after Didion’s husband’s sudden death; the years spend in Malibu, and New York and in a rambling house on LA’s Franklin Avenue; how extortionate phone bills were part of their relationship; as were holidays in Honolulu.

Much of the memoir was peppered with dates and flights and phone-calls that were made in the post-John era, as Didion navigated her way around the aftermath of losing her husband, while continuing to care for her coma-induced daughter, Quintana. It was only while I was researching this write up that I was to discover that she too died, eighteen months after her father’s passing, and later became the subject of another of Didion’s memoirs – Blue Nights,

While the story wasn’t a compelling one, it was one that slowly grew on me as the pages passed; poignant and powerful in nature, while it didn’t make me cry, it did make me think. About the fragility of life, and about how everything can change in the blink of eye; and about how you can see the world differently in a matter of minutes.

About Joan Didion

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American journalist and writer of novels, screenplays, and autobiographical works. Didion is best known for her literary journalism and memoirs. In her novels and essays, Didion explores the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos; the overriding theme of her work is individual and social fragmentation.

About The Year of Magical Thinking

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year’s Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book 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.”

Love this post?  Click here  to subscribe.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Bibliotherapy Sessions
• In the press
• Disclaimer + privacy policy
• Work with me
• The BBC Big Read
• The 1001 Books to Read Before You Die
• Desert Island Books
• Books by Destination
• Beautiful Bookstores
• Literary Travel
• Stylish Stays
• The Journal
• The Bondi Literary Salon