The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner

Joan Didion

Feb 2007 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

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.

Ratings and reviews

I remember that several years ago I happened to tune into one of the late night talk shows (probably Letterman) and Joan Didion was in the process of being interviewed. I had read one of her brief novels years ago – Play It As It Lays – and had always been impressed by its sparseness & ability to convey so much with a paucity of words. There had not been a picture of Didion on the jacket cover & so I had crafted an image of her in my mind of this chic, attractive urbanite equipped with a sharp tongue and even more rapier wit. Imagine my surprise when I saw that Didion was this diminutive, frail appearing waif who not only looked years older than her chronological age, but appeared to be at death’s doorsteps. In a soft, hushed voice she shared the tragedy that had just unfolded in her life & became the grist for memoir of that traumatic year. Now, four or five years later I find myself finally reading it & recognizing that her cool detached approach to writing fiction applies in equal measures to describing her psychic pain. Her daughter has fallen deathly ill & in that same space her husband of 40 years has died suddenly & quickly of a massive heart attack. Her daughter stages a come back only to lapse into an even more serious condition. This is what she writes about. She grapples with its meaning. She explores her refusal to concede that it has even happened. Her mind plays tricks on her; somehow, she finds herself convincing herself that she can change all of what has happened, She can make it go away. She can fix it – like erasing a mistake from a page of type. Of course, she cannot. All she can do is move through the grieving. And that is what her memoir for all practical purposes is about. And yet. And yet, for me anyway, there was a disconnect from the searing personal pain she must have felt & the sharing of those feelings. As I wrote that last sentence I realized that was what did not work for me. I could not feel her pain. There wasa little she wrote that attached me to her visceral experience. It was all so intellectual, devoid of real angst. Perhaps I am not being fair. Maybe her expression of loss is how she related to her own personal anguish. I don’t know. All I know is that it read too much like a cool, detached narrative prepared by a disinterested third party, not a grieving widow & saddened mother.

A magnificent literary masterpiece that allows the reader to feel the author's feelings through life's most adverse situations. A real civilian battle documentary that expresses all three of the pre, present, and post stressors of survival in the twenty first century.

I relived my own thoughts, feelings and loss through Joan 's experiences.

About the author

JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).
 
Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
 
In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021.