The Year of Magical Thinking [Hardcover]

Joan Didion (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 4, 2005

From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion 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.

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.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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.
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From The New Yorker

Didion's husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, just after they had returned from the hospital where their only child, Quintana, was lying in a coma. This book is a memoir of Dunne's death, Quintana's illness, and Didion's efforts to make sense of a time when nothing made sense. "She's a pretty cool customer," one hospital worker says of her, and, certainly, coolness was always part of the addictive appeal of Didion's writing. The other part was the dark side of cool, the hyper-nervous awareness of the tendency of things to go bad. In 2004, Didion had her own disasters to deal with, and she did not, she feels, deal with them coolly, or even sanely. This book is about getting a grip and getting on; it's also a tribute to an extraordinary marriage.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 227 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1 edition (October 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140004314X
• ISBN-13: 978-1400043149
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 1 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (691 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction. Joan Didion's Where I Was From, Political Fictions, The Last Thing He Wanted, After Henry, Miami, Democracy, Salvador, A Book of Common Prayer, and Run River are available in Vintage paperback.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

615 of 643 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Deserves to become a classic memoir about grief and loss October 6, 2005

By K. Corn TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I stayed up almost all might just to finish reading it, unable to put this down, although I confess I had to keep a box of tissues nearby. I've lost 5 people in the last few years and, just recently, another friend and so I related very strongly to this book.

Didion's unflinching account of the sudden loss of her husband (which occurred while their only child was in a coma in a hospital (!)) deserves to be a classic in the genre of books written by and for those who are grieving. It is hard to find books like this, which are both honest but not overly sentimental, not resorting to the tropes which seem to surround death. She doesn't offer vague platitudes or advice. She simply relates her very personal experience, including the inevitable vulnerability, unexpected moments of being blindsided by memories and sudden tears, etc.

She covers all the bases, including the kind of insanity that can seize one in the throes of grief, those moments when you forget the person is actually dead, when you turn to speak to him or her as you normally would at a certain part of the day or reach for the phone to share the latest news.

The book is raw. If you're looking for religous or spiritual guidance and inspiration, this is not the book for you. As Didion herself noted, writing about the book recently, it was intentionally written "raw". I assume she didn't want to wait, to distance herself from the intensity of the experience as she wrote it down, quite unlike many other books she has written. Raw or not, it wasn't sloppy, overly sentimental or complete despairing.

It was simply honest, heartwrenchingly so, and Didion doesn't deviate from communicating, in absolute striking detail, the sense of alienation and disorientation that separates mourners from those who seem to be living "normal" lives. Grief is its own territory, separate from so-called normalcy. In so many ways, it is an illness, an affliction of the spirit and not one that can be cured in any one way.

An aside- the photo of Didion inside the dustjacket is haunting. No question that those are the eyes of someone who has been scraped to the core, wounded and, presumably, still recovering. There is something beautiful in that portrait and, oddly, comforting. It is the face of a survivor, however hard it might be to live as one.

This book will remain on my bookshelf and I expect I'll be thumbing through it for solace time and again. Reading it was both painful and cathartic and strangely comforting, with an intensity that left me awestruck. I am still amazed that she was able to produce such a beautifully written book in the throes of so much pain.

344 of 363 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Don't hate me, but November 14, 2005

By J. R. SOUTH

Format:Hardcover

I'm not 100% sure why I bought this book. Certainly, the extremely generous reviews were a big push, as much as the fact that I recognize that Joan Didion is a superb writer. Maybe more than that, because I lost my mother and my grandmother within a very short span of time, and they lost their brother/son, then father/husband, in an even briefer time period. For awhile, "Magical Thinking" enthralled me with Didion's honesty and brutal detail. It even gave me nightmares, which I'm sure was not the author's intention, but that's how effective the writing is.

Part of Joan Didion's truthfulness is in dealing with her own avoidance of grief, and the extent to which an extremely intelligent, ever-thinking person will go to escape facing pain. But halfway through this short book, only 105 pages from the end, I almost gave it up, and I'm not sure I'm glad that I didn't. The endless facts, medical explanations, and most of all, Joan's continuous detachment from any emotion, left me feeling beat up and worn down. Yes, it even annoyed me a little. I give her all the credit in the world for approaching her task. Her love for her husband and daughter is extraordinarily apparent by the picture she paints of them, but she still comes through as only an observer. "The Year of Magical Thinking" is written in the first person, but not for a split second do we get a glimpse of any sensitivity coming from her. She only looks, thinks, and writes. But who is Joan, and what is going on inside her? Anything at all??

Buddhists have a valuable outlook on death. They meditate on it regularly, often among the bodies of the departed. Not viewed as morbid or surprising, death informs them how to appreciate life. In the West, we are always stunned by death, and instead of being always ready to accept it, by being kind to one another, knowing how quickly and unexpectedly a lifetime ends, we spend all our energy denying its existence, even after we've lost someone we love. And now we have a bestseller that tells all, except that it's normal and right to feel the pain.

Whatever else this book might be, it is definitely NOT a thesis on how best to deal with death and tragedy. And despite all the praise, "Magical Thinking" will not be everyone's cup of tea.

603 of 660 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Magical Thinking of Denial October 7, 2005

By prisrob TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"Grief is a multi-faceted response to loss. Although conventionaly focused on the emotional response to loss, it also has a physical, cognitive, behavioural, social and philosophical dimensions." Wikipedia

Joan Didion starts her book:
"Life changes fast
Life changes in an instant
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

On December 30, 2003 Joan and her husband, John Gregory Dunne were just sitting down to dinner about 9pm. They had returned from visiting their daughter, Quintana, who was comatose in an ICU in New York City. They were having a conversation as Joan put dinner on the table. She looked up, it was very quiet, John was not responding. He was slumped over the table with his hand raised. She realized all was not well, and in that instant her life changed. An ambulance was called; the trip to the Emergency Department, the meeting with the doctor, massive heart attack mentioned, and she knew her husband was dead. She returned home alone, did a few chores and went to bed and slept soundly. She awakened and realized something was wrong, and her first taste of grief descended.

Joan Didion has written a devastating story of her first year after the death of her husband, and the grief that enveloped her. She writes as she thought, and the story is laid out in detail as it happened and in her own words. She has friends and family but John isn't there. She talked to him every day for the forty years they were married. They talked constantly and were with each other all the time. Even though conventional wisdom has it that absence makes the heart grow fonder. She remembers thinking "there is no one to hear the news, no where to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back". Life changes in an instant. There is no place on earth to go where there is no memory. She kept expecting him to come back. She couldn't get rid of his shoes, because he needed shoes to come back. She knew this thought was irrational, but it kept her going.

She kept busy helping her daughter and son-in-law put their life back together, and then it comes apart when Quintana becomes ill again. There is much to do, much to read about Quintana's illness, much to discuss with the hospital staff that look at her strangely when she discusses edema and too much "fluid overload". She immerses herself in the language of medicine, and it keeps her busy for a while. She tried new projects, nothing really works except time, but she still keeps expecting John to come home. He never does. She remembers all the little things he said about his life. He told her they had to go to Paris that November because he might never have the chance again. He was right. He was frequently right. And, oh, she misses him, she always will. Magnificent story of the year in the life of grief. Highly recommended. prisrob