The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion

From one of America's iconic writers, 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. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic 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 suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of 40 years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LA airport, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Centre 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’. The result is an exploration of an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

‘A beautiful and devastating book’

ZADIE SMITH

The Year of Magical Thinking speaks beautifully and heart-rendingly of the power love has to give life meaning.

When Joan Didion’s husband died suddenly of a massive heart attack, a partnership of 40 years ended in a second. Just days before, the couple had seen their only daughter fall seriously ill. Despite the unshakable reality of her husband’s death, Joan Didion’s thinking was far from down to earth – she found herself, for instance, keeping his shoes in case he returned. Slowly she realised that beneath all the ritual and words lay a simple, aching truth – that she longed to perform an impossible trick and bring him back. This is the story of a year spent wishing; a year of magical thinking.

‘A poised, heart-rending memoir’

JOYCE CAROL OATES

‘A masterpiece of restraint and perception’

SUNDAY TIMES

‘Wise and profoundly affecting’

CRAIG BROWN, MAIL ON SUNDAY

Quintana Roo, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, Malibu, 1976

The Year of Magical Thinking

JOAN DIDION

Copyright (#ud9d9a315-aa4b-50a5-9e93-33c9e25d2f5c)

Harper Perennial

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harperperennial.co.uk (http://www.harperperennial.co.uk)

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2006

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2005

Copyright © Joan Didion 2005

Joan Didion asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007318001

Version: 2017-03-16

From the reviews of The Year of Magical Thinking:

‘This is a beautiful and devastating book by one of the finest writers we have. Didion has always been a precise, humane and meticulously truthful writer, but on the subject of death she becomes essential’

ZADIE SMITH

‘The book of the year … a heartbreaking, passionate book that offers no easy answers’

Guardian

‘A poised, heart-rending memoir’

JOYCE CAROL OATES

‘Joan Didion has produced, with desperate honesty, a book about loss and grief … It is astonishing to find a great subject, in all its sorrow, meeting its match in one of the true talents of our age’

COLM TóIBíN

‘A gripping account of the workings of bereavement and grief, unflinchingly analysed’

HERMIONE LEE, TLS

‘I read The Year of Magical Thinking in a sitting and can’t get over it. It’s not merely my book of the year, but one of my books of the decade. The precision of the memoir is astonishing, the value of the lives immeasurable. As a portrait of a marriage and an encapsulation of the writing life, as a commemoration of grief and a testament of love, this is a book that will never leave the mind of anyone who reads it’

ANDREW O’HAGAN, Scotsman

‘A luminously shocking memoir of bereavement … Her triumph is to show us that artifice – the shaping of prose, the arrangement of memory – need not strip the rawness of lived experience of its power’

ALEX CLARK, Daily Telegraph

‘The Year of Magical Thinking is in fact a year of lucid and rational thinking, about grief and mourning and feared loss; this account of a husband’s death and daughter’s grave illness is the more moving for not trying to be’

JULIAN BARNES

‘Her book, exploring an agonising universal experience, will speak to and maybe comfort anyone who has lost for ever the one they loved’

VAL HENNESSY, Daily Mail

‘You get her peerless sharp, stylish reporting and almost forensic attention to detail. To see her turning these instruments on her own ordeal is as shocking as it is moving. Grief, writes Didion, takes us to a place none of us knows till we reach it’

DAVID ROBSON, Daily Express