The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

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. Editorial Reviews You sit down to dinner, and life as you know it ends, Didion repeats in her hypnotic memoir about her life before and after the death of her husband, author John Gregory Dunne. In recounting her mourning with its mixture of loving reflections and painful second-guessing, she finds the words that eluded her for a year. An important addition to the literature of grief. (LJ 9/1/05) (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. - Library Journal During the Christmas holidays in 2003, novelist Joan Didion began a month of hell. Just a few days before Christmas, Didion and her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, watched helplessly as their newly married daughter, Quintana, came down with what seemed to be the flu, then contracted pneumonia, which led, within days, to complete septic shock and system breakdown. A week later, as Quintana hovered close to death, Dunne collapsed and died. Didion plunged into a mad state of magical thinking. Her response was unfathomable: 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 might need his shoes. A mourning no one could ever imagine. - In her devastating new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, Ms. Didion writes about the year she spent trying to come to terms with what happened that terrible December...It is an utterly shattering book that gives the reader an indelible portrait of loss and grief and sorrow, all chronicled in minute detail with the author's unwavering, reportorial eye. - The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative...As in Didion's previous writing, her sense of timing, sentence by sentence and in the arrangement of scenes, draws the reader forward. Her manner is deadpan funny, slicing away banality with an air that is ruthless yet meticulous. -The New York Times Book Review - Robert Pinsky The Year of Magical Thinking, though it spares nothing in describing Didion's confusion, grief and derangement, is a work of surpassing clarity and honesty. It may not provide meaning to her husband's death or her daughter's illness, but it describes their effects on her with unsparing candor. It was not written as a self-help handbook for the bereaved but as a journey into a place that none of us can fully imagine until we have been there. - The Washinton Post - Jonathan Yardley 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 thelarger public delusions that have been her special terrain. A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion's earlier writing. First printing of 60,000 - Kirkus Reviews Thrilling . . . a living, sharp, and 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 Stunning candor and piercing details. . . . An indelible portrait of loss and grief. -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times I can't think of a book we need more than hers. . . . I can't imagine dying without this book. -John Leonard, New York Review of Books Achingly beautiful. . . . We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is thus a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward. -Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Los Angeles Times An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief. . . . It also skips backward in time [to] call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage. . . . To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost. -Lev Grossman, Time - From the Publisher Can one call an audio performance ravishing? That's what Barbara Caruso delivers in this perfect marriage of writing and narration. Joan Didion has written an absorbing reflection on the year that followed the death of her husband of 40 years, the author John Gregory Dunne. It was a year in which she grieved while also caring for their severely ill only child, Quintana. In a voice as warm and clear as wildflower honey, Barbara Caruso speaks Didion's words as if they flow straight from her own heart. It's subtly done: a smile in the voice when the line is witty, an intake of breath before pain. Caruso sounds fascinated. And we are engrossed from first word to last. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, National Book Award Winner 2006 Audie Award Finalist AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine - FEB/MAR 06 - AudioFile