a book
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion · 2007 · 227 pages
One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Joan Didion delivers a searing portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost a husband or wife or child. In a work of electric honesty and passion, Didion explores how we all, somehow, will ourselves to survive. “An utterly shattering portrait of loss and grief.” –The New York Times
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana Roo, fall ill with septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later, the Dunnes were sitting down to dinner after visiting their daughter in the hospital when John suffered a fatal heart attack. In that one moment, their partnership of forty years came to an end.
This powerful narrative 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.”
“Didion has transformed grief into literature.” —The Guardian
recommended by 14 people
sourced from public statements
Ryan Holiday
“A masterful meditation on grief and loss following personal tragedy.”↗
Kerry Washington
“It doesn’t feel posh, or unattainable, unaccessible. It feels so human and grounded, like the best of us, right? And I love that the book just made me feel less alone in my grief and my loss. It made me feel like this was a well-tread path, that people had walked this road of loss and grief and survived it, and figured out how to live more richly in the context of that kind of loss. It’s quite a revelation, isn’t it? When you realize what a breakup is. It’s loss, and it’s grief, and it helps you feel so much less stupid.”↗
Kaia Gerber
“I love Joan Didion so much—I think she’s probably the author whose body of work has affected my life the most. Before reading The Year of Magical Thinking, I don’t think I’d ever read anything that captured grief in the way she was able to. There have been times when I was dealing with grief and I would read these articles or books that were meant to be very inspirational—they’d say, you can move on from this! They approached grief as something that happens, and then you progress from it. But I think Joan really captured that long, long process of grief—I don’t even know if you can call it a process because I don’t think it has an end. She captures the through line that it has within your life after the fact very honestly, and some of the feelings that we don’t like to talk about; the anger you might feel, for example. I thought it was brilliant how brutally honest she was, and I applaud her just for being able to write about something that most people can’t even put words to.”↗
Michelle Zauner
“What a heartbreaking memoir on grief by the absolute GOAT. Joan Didion’s writing is singular and perfect.”↗
Martha Wainwright
“I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking after I lost my mother. It was a very interesting account — very different from my own personal experience, in that hers was so descriptive and detail-oriented in terms of timeline and what happened to her husband and then her daughter’s illness. There’s a coldness and an objectivity to it that I really loved and somehow needed at that time. It also opened the door for me to read more memoirs.”↗
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
“@goldietaylor It’s such a good book.”↗
Sara Goldrick-Rab
“Oh, my heart. My grandma and I went to see her read The Year of Magical Thinking. Loved that book.”↗
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