BOOKS: The Year of Magical Thinking

In a word: Remarkable...

The Year of Magical Thinking
By Joan Didion
(Knopf, 2005 – hardcover, 227 pgs, $23.95)
2005 National Book Award - Nonfiction

"Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

These are the opening lines of Joan Didion’s extraordinary memoir of loss and grief, THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING. They are the first words Didion, a prolific and iconic American writer, was able to write almost a year after the sudden death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne on December 30, 2003. Adding to tragedy already in progress, Dunne suffered a fatal heart attack in their New York apartment as they sat down to dinner, after visiting their adult daughter, their only child, in the hospital where she lay comatose after an inexplicable collapse just days before Christmas. (After a partial recovery and extended illness, their daughter, Quintana Roo, died in August 2005, two months before the book was published.)

Didion returns to those words, those few, brief sentences, again and again throughout the book, as she works through her grief and shock over seemingly insurmountable loss. She writes with almost clinical detachment, heartrending in the evidence of emotional shock and pain, returning to the moment of her husband’s death many times to recount the details in precise arrangement of time, sights, sounds; her own thoughts, actions and impressions. She explains,
“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.”

Within the cold, hard facts; around the research, literature, and broad philosophies about death, illness and grief in which she searches for solace, Didion weaves the story of their lives: the forty-year marriage and literary partnership; adopting and raising Quintana; famous family and friends; good times and bad; fame and success. THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING is as much a fascinating, intimate autobiography, as it is a powerful and moving first-person account of tragedy and survival.