The Year of Magical Thinking

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.

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.

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 10/04/2005
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 8.32h x 5.40w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781400043149


Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee
Award: Quill Awards - Nominee
Award: National Book Awards - Winner
Award: Books for a Better Life - Finalist


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 06/01/2005 pg. 100
Publishers Weekly 06/27/2005 pg. 48
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2005 pg. 774
Booklist 08/01/2005 pg. 1950
Library Journal 09/01/2005 pg. 140
Vanity Fair 10/01/2005 pg. 138
Ingram Advance 10/01/2005 pg. 64 - Best Of The Best/Highly Recommended
Entertainment Weekly 10/07/2005 pg. 80
Time 10/10/2005 pg. 56
Newsweek 10/10/2005 pg. 63
New Yorker (The) 10/10/2005 pg. 87
New York Review of Books 10/20/2005 pg. 8
New York Times 10/09/2005 pg. 1
Commonweal 12/02/2005 pg. 32
Entertainment Weekly 12/30/2005 pg. 148
People Weekly 12/26/2005 pg. 55
Time 12/26/2005 pg. 177
Booklist Editors Choice/Adult 01/01/2006 pg. 6
Christian Century 07/25/2006 pg. 34
Booklist 06/01/2007 pg. 31
Entertainment Weekly 06/27/2008 pg. 102
Newsweek 05/04/2009 pg. 10
Entertainment Weekly 03/06/2015 pg. 72

About the Author
Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction.

Joan Didion's Where I Was From, Political Fictions, The Last Thing He Wanted, After Henry, Miami, Democracy, Salvador, A Book of Common Prayer, and Run River are available in Vintage paperback.