The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
Summary
On the night of December 30, 2003, John Gregory Dunne sat down to dinner in the apartment he shared with Joan Didion, his wife and collaborator of nearly forty years, and died of a massive coronary in mid sentence, while across town their only daughter Quintana lay unconscious in an intensive care unit. The Year of Magical Thinking is the book Didion wrote inside the year that followed, and it has become the modern classic of grief, the book the bereaved are handed. Its method is her lifelong method turned on her own mind: the cool sentences, the exact detail, the refusal of sentimentality, all deployed to document a derangement she can see and cannot stop, the magical thinking of the title, in which the survivor secretly negotiates with the universe for reversal. She cannot give away his shoes, because he will need shoes when he comes back, and she knows the belief is mad even as she obeys it. She reads the medical literature on cardiac death and the etiquette manuals on mourning with the same forensic hunger, replays the last weeks for the missed omen, and interleaves it all with the marriage itself, the working partnership of two writers in one house, Malibu and Brentwood and New York, finishing each other's drafts, so the book becomes a love story audited at the moment of its ending. Quintana's illnesses run through it, recovery and relapse, the second catastrophe held barely offstage. The book won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction, became a bestseller and then a Broadway monologue for Vanessa Redgrave, and it is where American writing about loss now begins.
Historical Context & Significance
Didion wrote the book in three months at the end of 2004 and deliberately left it unrevised when Quintana died in August 2005, weeks before publication, refusing to update the text because the book belonged to its year, and folding the second death instead into the stage version and the later memoir Blue Nights. The 2005 National Book Award came as the literary establishment's embrace of a writer who had defined American nonfiction since Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The New York Times later ranked it among the century's best books, but its real standing is measured differently, in the copies bought by the newly widowed, for whom it remains the honest companion, the one book that tells the truth about the strange year they are living in.