The Year of Magical Thinking

author
Joan Didion

the spiel
Sit down.  Author Joan Didion’s new book, The Year of Magical Thinking is stunning; there is no other word for it—except for heartbreaking.  This autobiographical book describes the period around Christmas 2003 when Didion’s daughter is struck a with life-threatening medical condition.  After coming home from the ICU, Didion and her husband, author John Gregory Dunne, are conversing while Didion prepares dinner, when Dunne suffers a massive coronary and dies. This book is Didion's gorgeous study of grief and mourning told through her memoir of John's death and Quintana's illness, and the result is a flawless meditation on both loss and the very life that it draws from. It is also a portrait of an extraordinary marriage. As Didion writes, "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."
The pages practically tremble with emotion, the prose quake with sensation. This book colored everything I read for months to come. Her deceptively simple prose get deep inside you, and her writing becomes unshakable. Intensely personal, utterly universal. Forever changed the way I look at the world.

other people who liked this book (or at least say they did)
“Her book is thrilling . . . a living, sharp, 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

“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

“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

“Stunning candor and piercing details . . . An indelible portrait of loss and grief . . . [A] haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage.”
–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

some other things this author has written
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Where I Was From
The White Album
A Book of Common Prayer
Play It As It Lays
Democracy
Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11
Political Fictions
After Henry
Run River
Miami
The Last Thing He Wanted
Salvador
Sentimental Journeys
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live : Collected Nonfiction (Forthcoming: September 2006)