The Year of Magical Thinking
By Joan Didion
- Release Date: 2005-10-04
- Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
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
Reviews
Slow Start but eventually couldn’t put it down!
4By shelby Reads AlotThis evoked several emotions and widen my perspectives. Meaningful read.Beautiful
5By KevinHNewtonGreat insight on the grieving process. As someone who lost his mom less than a year ago I found myself connecting with almost everything she wrote.A classic
5By Everythingbagel129This book, with its captivating language and gripping storyline, delivers eloquently the tragedy that is the loss of a loved one. Didion, a remarkable writer, uses this book as a way to cope with the loss of her husband. Small in page length, yet intense it subject matter. Absolutely brilliant.A truly magical read
5By _NOSCOPEThis is the first Didion book I have read and I look forward to reading more. While I knew the outcome for both John and Q (I had seen the documentary), I was riveted by her account of them. For me, her matter-of-fact writing style underscored the impossible task of describing such an immense loss and its aftermath. Much like parenthood, you have no idea what the death of a loved one is like until you experience it for yourself. Didion does a remarkable and brave job of bringing that experience to life for her reader.Insightful but not enough storytelling...
3By Vikki40While there were nuggets of wisdom that resonated with me and that I will take with me, this was not a story with a clear begging and end. It seemed more of a fact telling timeline devoid of the emotion that was so obviously left out. More of a clinical approach to death. I did not feel the warmth I should have felt at the loss of someone so near and dear to her life. Maybe that was her therapy....Very relatable
4By Long legionA book that in less professional hands could have been tiresome. However this is written by a wonderfully gifted author that knows how to relate her very personal feelings to the reader without being maudlin. Brought back a lot of my own feelings from when my mother died. Easily read and easily relatable
